Fully-featured suite is based on OpenOffice
DON SAMBANDARAKSA
Lotus, makers of the once mighty 1-2-3 spreadsheet, has announced its return to the consumer software space with the release of the Lotus Symphony 1.0 office suite which was the centre of attention at Lotusphere 2008, Phuket.
Michael Karasick, director of Lotus Software Development at IBM's China Development Lab, said that the feeling within IBM-Lotus was buzzing like never before, with developers excited at conducting customer usability tests and creating a user-facing application suite once again. Talking to end-users was quite different from talking to IT managers who were intent on rolling out the latest version of Notes-Domino at various cost-capacity points, he mused.
The name Symphony, first used for Lotus' first DOS-based office suite in 1984, was selected from a shortlist. "We didn't want to name it Smartsuite (the Lotus productivity suite of 1995) and Symphony was selected as everyone in the room smiled when the name was mentioned," he said.
Symphony itself is a fully featured office suite with word processor, presentation package and spreadsheet. Karasick believes that his team has created one of the best office suites available in terms of compatibility with legacy Microsoft Office documents, though he admits that the spreadsheet still has some work to be done, especially with financial analysts calling for advanced @ functions.
"I often get asked why Symphony is based on an older version of OpenOffice. I tell them that the current version of OpenOffice is also based on an older version of OpenOffice. Parallel evolution," he pointed out.
Lotus is now the last remaining customer-facing business unit within IBM, which otherwise now focuses on the enterprise space. Symphony is also the main component of the new Eclipse-based Domino-Notes workspace.
Symphony is available free of charge to download from the IBM web site and is also available in Thai.
Asked if another classic Lotus product, Agenda, a free-form personal information manager, and what many consider a precursor of Google's "search, don't file" methodology, would be revived, Karasick smiled and explained that a lot of work into enterprise search was currently being done and being enabled though the Open Document Format. ODF is XML-based and well-documented. This means that a lot of meaningful metadata can be added to elements within a file and, being XML, different programs, not just office suites, can interface and interact directly with the files.
Edward Orange, Asia-Pacific director for IBM-Lotus, spoke of future trends in the industry: The mobile Internet, open standards and how new businesses are never just about a new product, but a new combination of products and services, with companies today clamouring to stay ahead of the innovation curve. "Symphony looks and feels exactly like Office, a commoditised product, and normally for commoditised products, you don't pay a huge amount. You should be taking your precious investments and putting them into technology that gives you a strategic advantage," he said, explaining Symphony's place in the world.
To date, over one million copies have been downloaded, and of these 260,000 were in China. Many schools in the developing world, he noted, would rather hire teachers than pay for an office suite.
David L. Barnes, programme director for Emergent Internet Technology, said that Lotusphere Phuket was officially the last time that he would be talking about Web 2.0 as it was now here and real. Web 2.0 is used by businesses everywhere and is no longer considered emergent. From next week, his team's focus will shift to could computing. IBM was also moving in to the Software as a Service and appliance space.
Last year, IBM-Lotus bought a company called ISS Internet Security and later launched Lotus Protector which was "an appliance talking to the mothership."
This means that the appliance, which has email, calendaring and security, will automatically be updated and is simple enough to set up and go live within 30 minutes.
"The difference between us and our friends in Redmond is that their business model is focused around document-centric collaboration.
"If you look at their profit and loss statement, all their profits are from two things: Operating systems and Office. It is in their interest to focus around this document-centric collaboration," he said.
Lotus' approach is more organic. For instance, editing documents within the Notes client or using Sametime (Lotus' IM client) embedded in email (Notes) or create a teamspace for collaboration (Quickr).
Notes Traveller is a new version that provides access to the PIM functions of Notes with 8.01 and further versions are being developed with RIM, Nokia and Motorola.
The desktop client will also see a return to the Mac as well as Ubuntu Linux on the desktop with version 8.5.
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