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135 Comments
- theghoul, on 10/10/2007, -0/+26How did IBM get so cool?
Linux? DB2? Unleashing the beast on SCO? now Lotus Notes.. WTH? - Absinthminded64, on 10/10/2007, -5/+23If they had any sense they wouldn't have used the Lotus name. There are so many people out there that loath Lotus Notes that they'll associate this newfangled thing with extreme disfunctionality and the pure hatred that's usually reserved only for Notes.
- webcrumb, on 10/10/2007, -0/+16Direct Link, bypass IBM registration/login:
http://www6.software.ibm.com/sdfdl/v2/regs2/Normandy/Xa.2/Xb.egtQjMubyVWYxvzYhqzgBrjsm2NylgooNNC7f50/Xc.IBM_Lotus_Symphony_w32.exe/Xd./Xf.Ltr./Xg.4065752/Xi.swerplotus-lsymb3/XY.regsrvs/XZ.3TsJz-H_EgkhdmcqsDHYWtSuFQU/IBM_Lotus_Symphony_w32.exe
(shameless comment abuse) - Celeron, on 10/10/2007, -0/+15Competition ftw.
- cfd339, on 10/10/2007, -0/+12More important than just the release of this suite, is that (a) its based on Open Office - a prior fork; and (b) They're dedicating 20 or so full time developers to the Open Office project. What that means for Open Office is that a much increased level of professional QA, usability testing, and accessibility expertise gets added to the project. Since the product is core to IBM's offering around both Notes and Portal, it will get serious attention to being enterprise level workable.
IBM is also a huge factor in the Eclipse framework -- also Open Source. IBM supports Linux for pretty much a full suite of office productivity, email, collaboration, database, and web software both at the workstation and server. - ivorysky, on 10/10/2007, -0/+10The most important thing here is the word IBM in the software name. What is it they used to say - no one ever got fired for buying IBM? That holds true as much today as it did in the 70s. The people who make the decisions have heard of and trust IBM, much more so than openoffice.
- cuillini, on 10/10/2007, -2/+111GB of ram as a minimum, what the hell?
- bllambert, on 10/10/2007, -0/+9The screenshots look nice. I hope it works well in linux, and will check it out tonight.
- thcobbs, on 10/10/2007, -0/+9It's Java....
- WiseWeasel, on 10/10/2007, -0/+8Fear of irrelevance... Maybe MS might turn cool after they lose their hegemony...
- rohitbrai, on 10/10/2007, -0/+8Any idea how much different is it from Open Office/Sun's Star Office. I tried both of them and they seem to be the same. What is additional in Symphony?
- otaku22, on 10/10/2007, -0/+7Anyone else think it's funny that they re-used the name of their old integrated suite for DOS?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Symphony - Philluminati, on 10/10/2007, -0/+7no it doesn't. Those tabs look awesome. Like firefox for document editing!
- webcrumb, on 10/10/2007, -3/+9Good for you extending Microsoft's market monopoly...
- screwzluse, on 10/10/2007, -6/+12Meh, then maybe those people shouldn't use it anyway. If you're going to relate everything you know about something to one thing else in the past then they shouldn't bother moving on to the new technology. "I don't eat apples because an apple fell out of a tree once and hit me on the head."
- carandol, on 10/10/2007, -0/+6Apparently the entire island!
- spacebar14, on 10/10/2007, -1/+6Man, IBM's servers are being raped.
- subliminalurge, on 10/10/2007, -2/+7Stop being dumb.
- SimonGray, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4Get the bugmenot extension for Firefox. I never have to log in anywhere.
- bonedog73, on 10/10/2007, -2/+6If it's free then why do I have to sign in...
Register some freaking account that I will never use again.
Pain in the ass. - joeljkp, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4Wow, I thought this was just going to be a repackaged OOo or something, but the screenshots look completely different. Is this a separate product altogether?
- Philluminati, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4wow, now it's only $69 too much.
- NJank, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4am I the only person here old enough to remember Lotus 1-2-3 with fondness? Even in Excel, I still hit / to get to the menu via keyboard. And @ is where it's at... I remember Excel being thought of as the soft and pretty spreadsheet program, but Lotus was for "serious number crunching". We all know how that argument went. :)
- webcrumb, on 10/10/2007, -1/+5http://www6.software.ibm.com/sdfdl/v2/regs2/Normandy/Xa.2/Xb.egtQjMubyVWYxvkNjrz2MF_h04MzSVtpftRDb4U/Xc.IBM_Lotus_Symphony_w32.exe/Xd./Xf.Ltr./Xg.4065746/Xi.swerplotus-lsymb3/XY.regsrvs/XZ.B0oxB37YvS76Gy2cdDQW1AhrrFU/IBM_Lotus_Symphony_w32.exe
- geekelixir, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4ditto. I cant tell the last time i use any of microsoft office suite stuff. thank god the open source stuff are getting this powerful cause now i can sleep with a guilt free conscience if you know what i mean ARGH!! :)
- joeljkp, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4According to Wikipedia and my comment below, it's the OpenOffice core with a new GUI.
- jeffclark, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4I'm pretty sure I used Symphony on 5.25" disks and DOS 5....
- ShawnMunro, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3Anything that causes the crew in Redmond indigestion and distraction is a good thing from their (IBM) POV
- chmoder, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3Download link:
http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.jspa - GMorgan, on 10/10/2007, -5/+8Microsoft shouldn't have called XP Windows because the pure hatred that is usually reserved for Me would reflect on XP.
- spacebar14, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3Ahhh, thank you bugmenot.
- varun1s, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3IBM shouldve used a Bittorrent tracker...
- questro, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3Here is my experience with Lotus Symphony (LS) and OpenOffice.org 2.3 (OOo) running on RHEL 5. I am an IBMer that has used OOo daily for over 2 years and it is great! OOo 2.3 is in fact so much faster that the “quickstarter” option has been disabled in Linux.
The Lotus Symphony product is not as lucky...
Performance is slow because it is OOo repackaged in an Eclipse RCP wrapper (http://www.eclipse.org/home/categories/rcp.php). This makes for sluggish response and large system requirements. (compare OOo at 128 Mbytes RAM, 200 Mbytes available disk space with 900MB disk space minimum, GB RAM memory minimum for Lotus Symphony)
Ease of use (see slow above) is affected by some odd design choices:
* Menu structure is very different from the OOo menu structure
* Text properties sidebar opens always by default wasting screen space
* The “Open” button is really a “New” button because the only option when pressed is to create a new blank document, sheet or presentation. Look closely at the screenshot...
(http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/product_ss_wpe.jspa)
The major benefit of Lotus Symphony is that it will immediately give Notes 8 users access to the OpenDocument Format. But for me to get real work done, I'm sticking with OpenOffice.org 2.3. - chris4404, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3Microsoft's responding by throwing the full Office 2007 suite out for $69.
- Ebacherville, on 10/10/2007, -3/+6I hope M$ is getting scared from this and open office, and gogle docs, I use open office google docs all the time and love it it works just as well as M$ stuff for daily use.. Yet one more player in the free office suite..
- hackmyballs, on 10/10/2007, -3/+6I rather buy two pairs of Levi's and get free openoffice.org in any flavor.
Or a bag of weed if the urge arises.
See? There are many uses for those $60 besides being in M$ pockets. - joeljkp, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2Replying to myself here.
According to Wikipedia, it's the OOo core with a new GUI using Eclipse. Cool! - antdude, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2Is it better and easier than OO's one?
- Bartboy919, on 10/10/2007, -1/+3Why does it always seem that us OS X users are left in the dust in the terms of office apps. Open office requires X11, MS office is not yet Universal and lotus isn't even out for OS X yet. At least the people at NeoOffice are trying.
- Phocion55, on 10/10/2007, -1/+3Bashing the product before even trying it. Such a well informed consumer.
- thcobbs, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2Not much different because it will be based on Open Office.
- digguserer, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2Actually, most people blame it for the crappy email/calendar functionality. Lotus designers try to claim the main complaint is the sloppy applications written in it.. but no.. it is the horrible email and calendar client.
- counterplex, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2So it wouldn't leverage their existing product Lotus SmartSuite? It had the following I believe:
Ami Pro (aka Lotus Word Pro) for word processing. One of the best at one time.
Lotus 123 for the spreadsheet functionality. The program that started it all.
Lotus Freelance for the presentation functionality. Still a pretty decent product for business presentations (not for high-school type flashy presentations though)
There was also Lotus Organizer which was pretty decent but has many alternatives these days (Outlook or iCal/AddressBook) and some database application that competes with the POC that is Access.
I would've thought leveraging those might have been the best way to go forward but maybe there's so much legacy code there that they might as well start from scratch when building something meant to be cross-platform. - Phocion55, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2And making it extra shiny!
- hexydes, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2"IBM 'I can't believe it's not Office!'"
- webcrumb, on 10/10/2007, -2/+4Actually, it's not. StarOffice 5.2 was, but with the inception of OOo they ported. Good job too...
"Most of OpenOffice.org is written in C++. However, new features can be added using Java, Python, StarBasic, or JavaScript." - http://contributing.openoffice.org/programming.html - mscamara, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2They don't have a monopoly because you have dozens of alternatives, many of them free.
- DLHOUOKUSA, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2I love the fact that you can open a word doc, power point and excel sheet in one window. Tabs rule and should be used in all programs.
- mikewhite314, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2umm, this isn't OpenOffice
- gn0stik, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Impressive but until someone releases an office suite that has comparable apps to what Microsoft offers microsoft will still consider themselves superior. Give me graphics, diagramming, database, and collaboration on the level MS does. And an office "suite" without a mail client is useless. Now that Exchanges supports icalendar, there's no reason to not support exchange now in a mail client. Get with it guys, free is cool, but if you really want to kill the bloat and over charging at microsoft, deliver an office killer. A real one, and deliver it with a dev kit, and an answer to every MS app in their professional suite. It's close but not quite there. And with this particular offering, well, it's pretty but it doesn't even offer as much as star, or open office. Star is the closest to the MS office killer in my opinion, thus far.
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