IBM Lotus Symphony

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search IBM Lotus Symphony Developer(s) IBM Initial release 2007 Discontinued 3.0.1 FixPack 2 / 29 November 2012 (2012-11-29) Development status discontinued, will be replaced as Apache OpenOffice IBM Edition Operating system Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. Type Office suite, web browser License Proprietary (registerware); donated under Apache 2.0 license Website www-03.ibm.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.nsf/home/ Left to right: the icons for Lotus Symphony Documents, Presentations and Spreadsheets

IBM Lotus Symphony was a suite of applications for creating, editing, and sharing text, spreadsheet, presentations and other documents, browsing the world wide web, and as of 2013 is distributed as freeware. First released in 2007, the suite has a name similar to the 1980s DOS suite Lotus Symphony, but the two programs are otherwise unrelated. The previous Lotus application suite, Lotus SmartSuite, is also unrelated.

IBM discontinued development of Lotus Symphony in January 2012 with the final release of version 3.0.1. The source code was sponsored to the Apache Software Foundation to get merged to OpenOffice.org, which should occur in Apache OpenOffice 4 (due for release in early 2013). IBM plans to release a 'Apache OpenOffice IBM Edition' after the release of Apache OpenOffice 4. On 27 March 2012 a first fixpack update for Lotus Symphony 3.0.1 was released. On 29 November 2012 a second fixpack update for Lotus Symphony 3.0.1 was released.

Features

IBM Lotus Symphony consists of:

IBM Lotus Symphony Documents, a word processor IBM Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets, a spreadsheet program IBM Lotus Symphony Presentations, a presentation program a web browser based on Firefox 3

Each application is split into tabs.

Symphony supports the OpenDocument formats as well as the binary Microsoft Office formats. It can also export Portable Document Format (PDF) files and import Office Open XML files. Previous support for Lotus SmartSuite formats was disabled in Symphony 3.

A web based version of Symphony, called LotusLive Symphony, was planned for the second half of 2011, although it was already announced in February 2010 for first half of 2010.

It is based on Eclipse Rich Client Platform from IBM Lotus Expeditor for its shell and OpenOffice.org 3 for the core office-suite code, which will likely be dropped in the next major version of the Apache OpenOffice.

OpenOffice.org version 1.1.4 was dual-licensed under both the GNU Lesser General Public License and Sun's own SISSL, which allowed for entities to change the code without releasing their changes. Therefore, IBM does not have to release the source code of Symphony.

In 2009 IBM created development tools for BlackBerry smartphones to link to IBM's business software, which also allow opening ODF file-formats, following a full Symphony later.

Lotus Symphony 3.0.1 adds enhancements including support for one million spreadsheet rows, bubble charts, and a new design for the home page.

History

Symphony has its roots in the IBM Workplace Managed Client component of IBM Workplace. In 2006, IBM introduced Workplace Managed Client version 2.6, which included "productivity tools" — a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation program — that supported ODF. Later that year, IBM announced that Lotus Notes 8, which already incorporated Workplace technology, would also include the same productivity tools as the Workplace Managed Client. In 2007, IBM released Notes 8, and then released Notes' productivity tools as a standalone application, Symphony, in a beta one month later. The code in Symphony is the same as that for Notes 8's productivity tools.

IBM released version 1.0 of Lotus Symphony in May 2008 as a free download, and introduced three minor upgrades through 2008 and 2009. In 2010, IBM released version 3.0. It incorporated code from OpenOffice.org 3.x, and includes enhancements such as new sidebars in its user interface and support for Visual Basic for Applications macros, OpenDocument Format 1.2, and OLE. Symphony 3.0 was originally planned to include other existing OpenOffice.org modules, including an equation editor, database software, and a drawing program.

The software is developed by IBM China Development Laboratory, located in Beijing.

On 13 July 2011, IBM announced that it would donate Lotus Symphony to the Apache Foundation.

On 23 January 2012, IBM announced version 3.0.1 would be the last version Lotus Symphony, and their efforts would be going into the Apache OpenOffice project. When Apache OpenOffice version 4.0 is released, IBM plans to release an IBM Edition that will come with extensions to integrate it with their other products. Even though they did release a fixpack update afterwards on 27 March 2012.

Lotus Symphony Documents 1.0 on Windows XP Lotus Symphony Documents 1.2 Beta on Mac OS X

In 2012 IBM announced that it intended to integrate the symphony UI into openoffice.

Usage share

During the Lotusphere event in 2009, IBM confirmed its cost-reduction effort using Lotus Symphony, with the company migrating its 400,000 users from Microsoft Office to Lotus Symphony.

In June 2008 IBM urged its 20 000 'strong-techies' employees to use Symphony instead of Microsoft Office and later in September 2009 IBM forced all 360 000 employees to use Symphony. 20.0

In March 2009 a study showed that Lotus Symphony had a 2% market share in the corporate market.

In the same week of the release of Windows 7 (October 2009), IBM and Canonical announced that they want to sell Ubuntu with Lotus including Symphony.

As of February 2010 IBM stated that Lotus Symphony had 12 million users with 50 million downloads in January 2011.

Criticism

IBM was criticized that they didn't catch up the release cycles of OpenOffice.org and thus having an outdated suite.

There were complaints that IBM and the Apache Software Foundation didn't really provide an open-source release of the Lotus Symphony code, although IBM promised to donate the code to Apache. It was reported that some LibreOffice developers wanted to overtake some code parts and bug fixes which IBM already fixed in their OpenOffice fork.

Version release dates

Beta 1 Beta 2 Beta 3 Beta 4 Version 1.0 Version 1.1 Version 1.2 Version 1.3 Version 3 Beta Version 3 Beta 2 Version 3 Beta 3 Version 3 Beta 4 Version 3.0 Version 3.0 FixPack 1 Version 3.0 FixPack 2 Version 3.0 FixPack 3 Version 3.0.1 Version 3.0.1 FixPack 1 Version 3.0.1 FixPack 2

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