IBM Elite Support for IBM Lotus Symphony 1.0

Overview

IBM Elite Support for IBM Lotus Symphony 1.0, a support-only offering, delivers remote technical support. You can purchase this optional support via an annual subscription through Passport Advantage or Passport Advantage Express.

The three core applications making up IBM Lotus Symphony - Lotus Symphony Documents, Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets, and Lotus Symphony Presentations - are designed to handle most office productivity tasks that workers typically perform. Lotus Symphony applications support the Open Document Format (ODF) standard, which helps free users from proprietary file formats and expensive software licensing and upgrade agreements.

IBM Lotus Symphony gives users the freedom to create and share information, as well as assemble composite applications that link to business processes. Companies can integrate IBM Lotus Symphony tools into their custom applications and easily connect to a myriad of data sources to create composite applications. These rich applications enable users to work in a single view, and present data from multiple sources instantly.

IBM Lotus Symphony is a suite of office productivity tools that can be downloaded, installed, and used at no charge.

At a glance

IBM Elite Support for IBM Lotus Symphony 1.0 delivers the following benefits:

• Consistent level of support: IBM Elite Support for Lotus Symphony provides a level of support consistent with that used by other staffs equipped with IBM products including phone support and electronic support.
• Direct response to the customer: An IBM support technician will respond within two business hours.
• Unlimited support: There is no limit to the number of technical support incidents you can report through remote assistance.

Planned availability dates:

June 3, 2008 (IBM Elite Support)

ODF Comes of Age: IBM Lotus Symphony Turns 1.0

Nearly One Million Beta Users, 24 Languages, Web 2.0 Extensions, New Technical Support Services for Enterprises

ARMONK, NY - 03 Jun 2008: Open Document Format (ODF) comes of age today as IBM (NYSE: IBM) announces the commercial-grade, general availability of Lotus Symphony (http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony), a suite of free, ODF-based software tools for creating and sharing documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

This announcement affirms IBM's commitment to evolving office productivity software from static, financially draining software to a dynamic, cost-effective tool that allows businesses to invest in more innovative pursuits.

While Lotus Symphony remains a free, easy download from the Web with free online, moderated support, IBM is also announcing fee-based services to support the needs of large organizations. This optional service, IBM Elite Support for Lotus Symphony 1.0, delivers unlimited remote technical support at a level consistent with other IBM software products via an annual subscription to IBM's Passport Advantage or Passport Advantage Express volume licensing programs.

Lotus Symphony could save a company with 20,000 employees $8 million in software license fees or potentially more than $4 million in software renewal fees. If it chose to switch to Symphony for only half of its employee population, it could still save several million dollars in license or renewal fees, even if it subscribed to IBM's Elite Support services at $25 per user for 1,000 employees.

Launched in September 2007, Lotus Symphony has been downloaded by nearly one million individuals in an open public Beta program. Lotus Symphony is a truly global product, available in 24 languages, developed by a worldwide team anchored in Beijing, China, and improved through the community of individual users on the Symphony Web site.

"Major technology vendors are lining up to support ODF -- even those previously opposed to it," said Steve Mills, SVP of IBM Software. "Symphony -- backed by enterprise customer support services -- is ready for business."

A growing number of businesses are considering decisions to renew their Office licensing agreements, and move up to Office 2007 and Vista. Lotus Symphony 1.0 provides a timely and cost-effective alternative tested by nearly one million people worldwide and backed by IBM.

Theres something weird about using a version 1 product, even in 2008. Maybe its my Windows upbringing where everything had to be .1, else youd risk losing your work and wasting your time with an unfinished product.

Of course, Ive been using Lotus Symphony since Beta2 release (which is now in Notes 8.0.1) and have just downloaded the V1 RC2 yesterday (internal).

Coming soon... get ready!

The OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF) is an XML standard that lets you store and exchange office application documents, including word-processor, spreadsheet, and presentation files. Whether you try to perform special tasks on files saved from such applications or work on applications to process such files, you should become familiar with this important format. Learn about the two possible forms of OpenDocument files, as multipart packages and as single XML documents, and learn how to structure text and tabular information in OpenDocument.

In this tutorial

Even from the early days of computers in the office, word processors, spreadsheets, presentation software were the giants among applications. From Lotus® 1-2-3 and WordStar to today's behemoth integrated office suites, much of the information valuable to computer users is maintained in the saved files of office apps. Recently people and organizations are more conscious about the importance of open data formats. You don't entirely own your data if the only way to use it is through the interface of a proprietary application. With the acceptance of XML as lingua franca for semi-structured data, users inevitably began to demand open formats for their office apps, preferably in XML. Users want to be able to make some sense of what's in their saved files, and to use a variety of tools on them.

Responding to such demands In 2002, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) began an effort to create a standard for office application files, formally called OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications and popularly abbreviated ODF. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) followed up with acceptance of ODF as an international standard (ISO/IEC 26300). After years of overall development, ODF nears version 1.2 and covers spreadsheets, word processor documents, presentation files, drawings, and more. You've probably come across files with extensions such as .odt, .ods, .odp, or .odd. Obviously you can process such files by running an office application suite. But sometimes you need more control, or you need to do things that are not the typical role for office applications. Suppose you wanted to develop a system that automatically generated open document files from a Web form, or perhaps a search engine for office documents. In such cases you need a good understanding of the storage format, and this tutorial offers an easy start.

I was explaining my interest in integration between IBM Lotus Workplace products and Second Life in another blog but that description didn't resonate. It struck me that a longer description might be worth a blog entry in its own right in my blog. I've been meaning to do a series of entries on possible integration points anyway so lets start off with the IBM Lotus Symphony Spreadsheet.

User Experience
Mark Ajeti is an analyst for a non-profit company who monitors public expenditure and is responsible for spotting trends in spending habits. His company recently migrated to Lotus Symphony because it is free and supports non-proprietary document formats. He imports his data into a Symphony spreadsheet to examine it in various ways. The charting feature provided is fundamental as seeing a picture of his data often helps him to understand more deeply what is going on than just numbers. With more data becoming available for examination the complexity of the relationships he is looking for has increased. He needs a more powerful way of looking at the information.

So Mark selects the elements of data he is interested in. He then selects a menu entry that was supplied by a plugin to Symphony. This looks a lot like the charting tool except that the charts he can choose amongst are all three dimensional. He chooses amongst these the data representation he wants to try and it informs him it is creating the chart definitions for Second Life.
Mark then switches tabs in his Symphony Environment to an embedded Second Life viewer supplied by another plugin. The Head's Up Display his Second Life avatar is wearing indicates the new chart along with the other charts he has available for viewing. He selects the new chart and it begins to be constructed before him.
When it is finished he can examine the chart, fly over it, or walk through it to see the data from different angles. He can copy it to his inventory, and pass it to several colleagues along with his comments for their interest.

One of his colleagues, Louise Mäkitie, thinks that one of the views shows something important and wants to work it into a presentation she is planning. However we will discuss that, next, when we talk about Symphony Presentations integration.

Symphony is easily extendable with the menu and 3D charting tool described. I already have a fairly crude servlet that creates 3D pie charts. Adding in an embedded Second Life viewer is no harder than embedding it in a browser, which has already been done. On the Second Life side, I've already created proofs of concept for this sort of work. It's a little slow because of anti-griefing protections Second Life has, but it's usable.

I would estimate it would take about 120 programming hours to implement this integration. No special knowledge is required. All the information for Symphony integration is in the published SDK and Eclipse manuals. Second Life scripting is public knowledge and the client is open source.

Microsoft Office is the industry's leading productivity suite and has close to 85% marketshare.  The downside?  It's expensive - especially for a company as large as IBM that continues to grow.  At last count, IBM had 370,000 employees.   Money spent on Microsoft Office licenses increases IBM's overall expenses.     Launched last year, Lotus Symphony beta offers

"productivity tools that are intuitive and easy to use and provided at no charge. Lotus Symphony puts you in charge – take control over spiraling upgrade costs, ensure access to documents well into the future with new standard file formats (ODF), get more from your current investments with support for Microsoft® Windows® and Office file types.... even extend your applications with the new Lotus Symphony developer toolkit.  Lotus Symphony offers something for everyone! Read more about benefits for users, businesses, and developers"

Inside IBM, our employees are using Lotus Symphony and in some cases, removing Microsoft Office from their workstations.  Later this year, the product is targeted to graduate out of beta as also release a Mac OS X client.

Frankly, I’ve lost all interest in OpenOffice ever since I came across IBM’s Lotus Symphony. Yes, I’m perfectly aware that right now it’s under a proprietary license - but that’s because it modifies an older code-base of OpenOffice (v1.x), which was dual-licensed. Anyway, Symphony 2.0 will also be released, and will have to be open source as the OOo v2.x code-base is under LGPL. Why do I like this new entrant? Here’s why:

• Tabbed interface: It’s high time someone did this, given that it has been so popular in the web browser market. Lotus Symphony has a tabbed interface - which means, you can open up a word document, a spreadsheet, and a presentation - all in one window in tabs. Or any combination of the type of documents.
• Context-sensitive editing: Many people have said time and again that they find MS Office 2007’s Ribbon-style confusing. Symphony finds an elegant solution to that, by keep the normal formatting bar where it should be; and instead, adding a context-sensitive sidebar. So for example, when you open a presentation, the sidebar shows stuff that you can do on a slide / page; while if you click on an object (like a picture or a text box), it changes to show stuff you can do on that object. Even the formatting bar at the top keeps graying out options which can’t be used at that time.
• Better looks!: I wouldn’t have admitted this fact earlier, but since Symphony is out, to hell with OOo. Absolutely childish icons, as if they had been made in TuxPaint. In fact, I’m darn sure they must have been made in TuxPaint. Symphony’s interface is the total opposite, with a nice cool blue shade, and everything else which doesn’t look like a GTK+ program. Put simply, it looks elegant.

The wait is over – IBM Lotus Symphony can now be extended with plug-ins to integrate and enhance a wide range of applications from IBM, and you.

Now it is easy to make Lotus Symphony part of your business solution. Integrate Lotus Symphony documents with other data such as IBM Lotus Notes applications, WebSphere Translation Server, or other important applications in your organization for linked value at the desktop.

Designed to leverage open technology and provide an easy development and deployment environment, Lotus Symphony will support leading development technologies – Java/Eclipse, LotusScript, OpenOffice, and .Net* (*.Net support planned for a future release).

As of Beta 4, you can extend Lotus Symphony with Eclipse plug-ins using our API's and Developer Toolkit. Also, with support for LotusScript (when the Symphony productivity tools are used inside Notes 8) and the UNO API, Lotus Symphony supports a wide range of development requirements and business needs.

Are you a developer interested to learn more? The new IBM Lotus Symphony Developer Toolkit for creating Eclipse plug-ins is here. The toolkit provides documentation as well as samples and tutorials that you need to build your plug-ins.

So, whether you are a Lotus Notes developer using LotusScript or a Java developer on Eclipse, you have the ability to leverage Lotus Symphony in your business applications.

The tutorial in the toolkit provides instructions for creating a simple document workflow plug-in. The document workflow application provides a way to apply a simple workflow to your office documents in a document library. The document you will use in this lab is built on a specific template, and stored locally. In this lab, you will create the plug-in from start to finish and use pre-created snippets of code in order to speed the manual data entry process. This lab is intended for developers who would like to use the plug-in development environment to extend Lotus Symphony and who are familiar with Java programming. Eclipse and OpenOffice.org UNO programming knowledge are preferred but not necessary.

I am pleased to announce a new PSC solution that provides services for IBM Lotus Symphony. A 2 day services package, the 1st day provides an executive and developer briefing. The 2nd day provides an analysis of how the company is using Lotus Symphony competitors, both for end-users and custom applications and integration, and helps make a case for migration. You can get the PDF about the package here.

If anyone is interested in this offering, please contact me! I think 2008 will be a very interesting year for Lotus Symphony.