IBM takes on Microsoft Office again with Lotus Symphony
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Desktop suite Lotus Symphony runs on Windows and Linux and supports OpenDocument, PDF and Microsoft Office document formats.
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IBM Lotus expanded its lineup of Workplace client-computing software Tuesday, debuting an Express version of the product for small and midsize businesses.
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IBM said it is joining the OpenOffice.org community to collaborate on software development for the Open Document Format (ODF), an ISO standard that governs the creation, storage, and exchange of documents.
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At Enterprise 2.0, IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced the availability of IBM Lotus Quickr, team collaboration software that includes IBM's first commercially available wiki and integration with everyday office applications from Lotus and Microsoft.
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(InfoWorld) - The update to its Lotus Sametime software that IBM has been promoting for months will launch Wednesday, and the company plans to show off not only the product but also partner applications built using its new extensibility platform. In January, IBM announced it wasÂ planning a major update to Sametime, its corporate instant-messaging and collaboration software. It said the product would have voice over IP (VOIP) capabilities, integration with public IM clients from America Online, Yahoo, and Google and client-side support for Apple Computer's Mac OS X 10.4 and Linux. As part of the revamp, IBM also added support for the open-source Eclipse development framework so third-party companies could build applications on top of Sametime. At a launch event in New York on Wednesday, partners such as Cisco Systems and Dassault Systemes will show off applications that leverage Sametime's ability to let users connect in real time, said Ken Bisconti, vice president of Lotus software products at IBM. Cisco will demonstrate Sametime plug-ins that let users "click to call" a VOIP audio conference that uses the networking company's technology, he said. Dassault, a French company that provides project-management software, is using its 3D modeling technology in conjunction with Sametime to let Sametime users view models of products -- for example, an airplane -- and connect via instant messaging or voice with the designers of different parts of the product, Bisconti said. Pricing for Sametime 7.5 is $55 per user. The product began shipping in mid-August. IBM is already planning enhancements for the product's next major upgrade, due some time next year. Keeping in line with its intention to make Sametime more extensible, IBM in the next version wants to improve Sametime's Web conferencing aspect by making it more open to external developers, said Adam Gartenberg, IBM's offering manager for real-time collaboration. For example, IBM is considering creating an API (application program interface) to let developers embed audio/video conferencing windows from other providers into Sametime's Web conference interface, he said. With Sametime 7.5 today, it's possible to schedule a third-party audio/video session when reserving the Web conference, or to launch an "instant meeting" from the IM client, he said. This brings up both a Sametime Web conference and a third-party audio/video session simultaneously, each with its own window on the desktop, he said. The planned API would give users an integrated video window where they could see all aspects of the Web meeting in one place, he said. IBM is also considering making the Sametime Web conferencing portion more modular, so elements of it can be made available outside the Web conferencing interface, Gartenberg said. These elements, such as uploaded files, desktop or application sharing capabilities and virtual whiteboards, could be made available from within IM or e-mail environments, he said. Instant messaging and real-time collaboration systems have traditionally been proprietary, so attempts to open up these systems to a broader IT universe are interesting, said Matt Brown, a Forrester Research analyst. "IBM is certainly pushing this idea of interoperability and [making] real-time collaboration a platform component that can be consumed by other applications," Brown said. Regarding IBM's plans, Sametime's Web conferencing would become less a place for users to meet online and more of an integrated part of the work they're involved in, Brown said. So, an e-mail sent to a group could be seamlessly escalated into a Web conference including every recipient, Brown said. Or a Web conference could be embedded into a product design application so the team could share designs and models in an ad-hoc way, Brown said. Sametime has more than 16 million users and is quite a mature product, but Microsoft hopes to steal some of its thunder with an update to its own real-time collaboration product. The company plans to ship Office Communications Server 2007 -- aÂ revamped and rebranded versionÂ of its Live Communications Server product -- as a competitor to Sametime in the second quarter of next year.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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Microsoft Corp.&#039;s best-known business software is for creating spreadsheets, documents and presentations, but the company is hoping to convince corporations that it also can be the one-stop shop for sophisticated communications technology.
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International Business Machines Corp  said on Tuesday that it will offer its Lotus email and  collaboration products as a service that customers can access  through a Web browser.
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(InfoWorld) - After years of holding out, IBM has joined the OpenOffice.org open-source community and will contribute code to the office suite that serves as an alternative to Microsoft's Office software. IBM has been using code from the project in its development of productivity applications it included in Lotus 8, the latest version of its collaboration suite, but until now had not been an official member of the community, said Doug Heintzman, director of strategy for the Lotus division at IBM. The company now will contribute its own code to the project and be more visible about its work to integrate OpenOffice.org into Lotus, he said. Heintzman acknowledged that theÂ International Organization for Standardization's (ISO's) recent vote to reject Microsoft's Open XML file format as a technology standardÂ was one reason IBM decided to join the effort. OpenOffice.org uses ODF (Open Document Format), a rival file format to Open XML that is already an ISO technology standard. IBM is one of the companies pushing for the use of ODF in companies and government organizations that are creating mandates to only use technology based on open standards in their IT architectures. "They are certainly related," he said of the ISO vote and IBM's decision to join OpenOffice.org. "We think that it's now time to make sure there is a public code base that implements this spec so we can attract a critical mass to build these new value propositions." Sun founded OpenOffice.org and offers its own commercial implementation of the suite, called StarOffice. The company, a long-time IBM competitor in the hardware and software markets, also has been the primary contributor to the code, one of the reasons IBM balked for so long before joining the group. "[The community] has had some challenges in recruiting an awful lot of big names to support the activity, but [now] we think there are some that can provide an example to us all to provide a vibrant place to add value," Heintzman said. "We hope that our voice at the table will help us evolve the community." Intellectual-property attorney and well-known ODF supporter Andrew Updegrove noted that the ISO's decision andÂ recent interest in StarOffice by GoogleÂ may have been enough to inspire IBM to set aside any competitive differences with Sun and work with them to promote OpenOffice.org as an alternative to Microsoft Office. Momentum from the ISO's rejection of Open XML is a prime opportunity for OpenOffice.org to become a real alternative to Office, he said. "Most likely, the setback for [Open XML] ... and Google's announcement a month ago that it would include StarOffice 8 in its free Google Pack download figure into IBM's decision," Updegrove wrote in an e-mail to the mailing list for his Standards Blog. "Those events help provide the type of public momentum that ... offer the prospect for the type of greater rewards that help displace other considerations and historical impediments. Whatever the reasons may have been that have kept Sun and IBM from working together to support OpenOffice over the past four years more fully, the reality is that a chance to break an industry monopoly that generates $15 billion in revenues a year comes only once in a generation -- when it comes at all." In a press statement, Sun welcomed IBM's addition to the group, which claims it has had 100 million downloads of its software since it launched in 2000.
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IBM's new Lotus Web Conferencing Service, expected to be offered next month, requires that users simply register an account and have an Internet connection, a Web browser and a phone.
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E-mail software from IBM Corp. will be available on Apple Inc. iPhones and iPod Touch devices under a new partnership that brings together two big rivals of Microsoft Corp.
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Open Client platform no longer closed off IBM has announced an open-source desktop, running Lotus apps and Firefox on top of Red Hat or SUSE Linux. It's based on an internal project which has deployed Linux desktops to several thousand IBM staff, in what IBM said was one of the largest corporate Linux roll-outs to date.â¦
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Can MySpace show IBM how to sell collaboration software? Lotus GM Michael Rhodin thinks so.
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IBM Corp. is to offer the world a free word processor, spreadsheet and presentation program in yet another bid to upset the dominance of Microsoft&#39;s Office suite.
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Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said Monday that the Windows application platform is to be fitted with "Fluent UI" ribbon capabilities now offered in Office 2007.The ribbon UI presents a new interface in Office 2007. "We usability-tested it massively, and fortunatel, it has had a very strong positive reaction," Gates said during a keynote presentation the 2008 Office System Developer Conference in San Jose, Calif. "We in the next version of Windows will be using this Fluent UI quite a bit across a number of applications," he said. "It turns out it's a user interface that works very well for the pen and touch [interfaces] as well as being a better way of revealing application functionality."The Fluent UI represented "a major risk that Microsoft took," Gates said. But the older interface with its dropdown menus was hiding so much functionality that the company was being asked for features that were already there but were concealed, he said.At the conference, Microsoft is promoting Office as a development platform with users able to write extensions. During Gates's presentation, third party applications were shown that extended Office with custom development, such as the MindJet MindManager planning application and FedEx's QuickShip for processing FedEx shipments from within Microsoft Outlook.During a subsequent question-and-answer session with the audience, Gates was asked to compare and contrast opportunities for developers working with platforms like Microsoft's with platforms like open source. Gates responded, "Our platform is a commercial platform where customers expect a very high level of service, a very high level of integration, but the nice thing about it is they are willing to pay for software."Free software has always been around, he said. "We've always had free software out there, it's not really a new thing. In fact, I'd say in some ways it's less of a factor than it's ever been," Gates said.Everyone has the same business model, he said: Software developers have free versions of their software, inexpensive software, and robust commercial versions of their software. "The commercial environment, I think, will always be the pre-eminent thing in terms of providing business productivity," said Gates.He advised those who want to develop free software to be careful which licensing model they choose and to select an option that does not restrict commercial versions of their software.Asked about Yahoo, which has rejected Microsoft's $44.6 billion acquisition offer, Gates said the question was whether Yahoo should be a media company or focus on engineering. In an ad model, scale is needed, he said. Yahoo's engineering could be combined with what Microsoft has done, he said.Gates's overall presentation did not impress one attendee, who nonetheless was impressed with Gates himself."Bill is definitely a visionary, and he's one of the greatest men in the 20th century, but I have to wonder how much of that was just reading from a script," said Aaron Alanen, senior consultant at Sogeti."I did see in his questions later on that he really had some deeper knowledge," Alanen said.During Gates's presentation, he also played a tongue-in-cheek video about what he would do during his upcoming semi-retirement from Microsoft. Included were possibilities such as getting into politics, joining the rock band U2, and becoming a rapper or actor. Guests featured in the video included, among others, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Al Gore, Bono from U2, and George Clooney.
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IBM is developing a new, "one-stop-shop" product offering, Lotus Foundations, aimed at companies with five to 500 employees, it said Monday.
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One of the major contributors to the leading open source alternative to the Microsoft Office Suite announced early this morning it will be offering additions to OpenOffice enabling it to support Office 2007's new XML-based Office Open XML format.
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InfoWorld - IBM has created a free semantic e-mail search engine aimed at users of the company's Lotus Notes software and Microsoft Outlook.