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 is moving forward with its Jazz application lifecycle management platform Monday, expanding access to the Jazz.net community and touting Project Bluegrass, which seeks a virtual world for developer collaboration.The company also is readying a second beta release of the first Jazz product, called IBM Rational Concert Express."The first thing we're doing is we're opening up the Jazz.net community to everyone," and allowing them to participate in the evolution of Jazz, said Scott Hebner, vice president of marketing and strategy for IBM. Previously, the year-old Jazz.net community was open only to IBM Rational customers, academics and partners.Allowing greater access to Jazz.net boosts exposure, noted Liz Barnett, principal analyst at EZinsight. "They're going to expose the technology to a much wider audience, certainly [to] many people who are not IBM tool customers," she said.Jazz represents IBM's approach to enabling better collaboration in software development projects that can be distributed across the globe."The Jazz technology is designed to help people work together more [effectively] and collaborate in the development and delivery of software," said Hebner. What is different about Jazz is it provides real-time collaborative technology to manage under the covers all information pertaining to the health of a software development project.Unlike previous ALM products, Jazz offerings will adapt to the way that users want to use them instead of users having to adapt to the products, Hebner said. Featured in Jazz products is a central repository to store information about different software development projects.With Bluegrass, IBM is attempting to bring the visual, collaborative nature of virtual worlds to software development. Hebner cited the Second Life 3D online environment as offering the kind of functionality IBM wants to bring to ALM with Bluegrass.Developers could work together while viewing interactive representations of ideas and data. Avatars, or graphical representations of participants, would be used as well. Geared toward new, younger workers used to Web 2.0-style communications, Bluegrass is a research effort that may result in products from IBM or other companies.Bluegrass will be demonstrated at the Lotusphere conference in Orlando, Fla. next week. Bluegrass also is available on the IBM Codestation kiosk in Second Life.IBM Rational Team Concert Express is intended for smaller development teams looking to use agile development techniques and collaborate across the globe, Hebner said.The product should appeal to the agile community, Barnett said. "It's a lightweight toolset, and it's really easy just to pick up and use and extend on your own," said Barnett.With the second beta, IBM has added capabilities for team collaboration and gauging project health; Web dashboards are featured. Also, users also can leverage a broader set of underlying infrastructure, including Oracle databases, Lotus Sametime communications software, and Apache servers.?The first beta arrived last summer; general release of Team Concert Express is planned for later this year.At the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Team Concert Express has been used to develop a tool called Emergent Expertise Locator, which recommends members for development teams based on an examination of how files have changed hands and who has participated."Essentially, the tool's looking at the story of how changes have been committed to the code base," said Gail Murphy, computer science professor at the university.?Over time, key IBM Rational products, including the ClearCase software configuration management system, ClearQuest for software change management, and Build Forge for build and release management, will incorporate Jazz technology. This will enable participation in a more collaborative real-time ALM platform, Hebner said. These upgrades will begin to arrive later in 2008.
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IBM OmniFind Personal Email Search is a semantic search engine for users of Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook.
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Software giant tailors new version of office suite for small-business users.
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Can MySpace show IBM how to sell collaboration software? Lotus GM Michael Rhodin thinks so.
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Microsoft is calling IBM out over its opposition to Office Open XML, saying it is attempting to create a movement to prevent ISO standardization of the format.
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Responding to government requests for  interoperability, Microsoft Corp.  said on Thursday it  will offer free software that will allow Word, Excel and  PowerPoint to handle documents in rival technology formats.
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After years of holding out, IBM Corp. Monday has joined the OpenOffice.org open-source community and will contribute code to the office suite that serves as an alternative to Microsoft Corp.&#39;s Office software.
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But will it do Web 2.0 without Notes? IBM is the latest big company to jump onto the social networking bandwagon, via its Lotus subsidiary which has at last released its much-hyped information-sharing and community-building software, Lotus Connections.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - IBM's move to develop its own suite of productivity applications to compete with Microsoft's Office software is part of a larger war the two companies are waging in the market for employee collaboration applications. Many companies use Lotus Notes/Domino for e-mail and messaging alongside Microsoft Office for productivity, and each company is trying to leverage the strength and popularity of its core software package to encourage customers to buy other collaboration offerings for a complete vendor-centric stack. A one-vendor scenario for collaboration could play out in the longer term, and Microsoft already has a leg up on IBM because customers who don't use Lotus/Domino pair Microsoft's Outlook/Exchange Server for messaging with Office. However, at least in the short term, customers using both Lotus and Office have application dependencies that would make it difficult to implement an all-IBM or all-Microsoft environment for collaboration, according to customers attending IBM's Collaboration Summit in New York this week. With Lotus Notes 8 and related applications like Sametime, Quickr, and a new Lotus product called Connections, IBM has linked the facets of its collaboration software together so individuals working in team environments can share information more seamlessly without having to toggle back and forth between different software interfaces. The new suite also gives Lotus more of a unified desktop feel, something users would get when they use traditional Microsoft applications. In Notes 8, IBM also included office productivity applications based on OpenOffice.org, strategically calling the products "editors" rather than productivity apps to imply that they don't have to be part of an entire separate suite, said Erica Driver, analyst with Forrester Research. "IBM is saying, 'it's not a big deal,'" and that you don't need an entirely separate suite for word processing, spreadsheets, and the like, she said. "They want people to think of these applications as buttons in Lotus Notes. It's a smart move because it commoditizes the basic capabilities [of Office] and forces Microsoft to add value." To continue its offensive against Office,Â IBM also this week spun out the productivity apps in Lotus 8 as Symphony, a free, stand-alone suite that is available for download on the Web. Microsoft is approaching collaboration from a slightly different direction. With Office a de facto standard on the corporate desktop and Exchange/Outlook a competitive alternative to Notes/Domino with many customers, the company is using its rebranded and revamped portal, Office SharePoint Server, as a way for customers to surface information from back-end applications through common Office apps. The idea is that people are already familiar with Office applications, so it will be easy for the population of employees Microsoft calls "information workers" to use those common interfaces to share project tasks, information and to communicate with one another. "Microsoft's viewpoint is, 'Everyone loves Office,'" Driver said. "All the other stuff works into those applications." But getting a company to drop Office or Notes when they've been using one or the other for years is no easy task, an IT professional said. For one thing, if a company has had one of those applications in the environment for some time, there are a host of other applications that likely depend on their existence on the network, said Steven Franzen, senior systems engineer for Union Pacific Railroad. He said his agency's IT environment is both a Notes/Domino and Office shop, and there are legacy applications that just can't be removed easily. However, phasing in something like IBM's Symphony to replace Office could work on a case-by-case basis after doing some analysis of employee roles, he said. For some employees who don't create a lot of documents and may only need to view and share them, Symphony could be a good alternative to replace some costly Microsoft licenses. "We will look at Symphony to provide cost savings," Franzen said. "If you look at someone who just consumes data versus someone who creates it, it would be nice to have a low-cost option." Irwin Horowitz, systems specialist for chemical company BASF Group, agreed that a product like Symphony could be a replacement for Office for some users, but it will be a hard sell as a rip-and-replace scenario for companies that have a long history of using Office. But even if that's the case, at least Symphony does give IT decision-makers "leverage" with Microsoft to try to pay less for Office licenses. "I can say, 'I don't like the deal you're giving me, Microsoft, and I'm looking at someone else's technology," Horowitz said. Another subtext to the collaboration war between Microsoft and IBM is the idea of open standards. Symphony and the document applications in Lotus Notes are based on ODF (Open Document Format), a standard file format approved by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Microsoft Office is based on OOXML (Open XML), whichÂ Microsoft created and submitted to the ISO but which did not pass a vote there earlier this monthÂ and has to undergo further process on its way to approval. There has been widespread industry debate over ODF and OOXML and whether the industry needs more than one XML-based format for documents. Microsoft's insistence on pushing its own file format has given competitors a chance to offer real alternatives to Office for the first time. In addition to competing strategically from a market standpoint, IBM also is pitting itself against Microsoft as a company that cares about software standards while its rival does not. Both Franzen and Horowitz agree that standards do give them more flexibility in their IT environments. And Lotus Notes can be run on a Linux desktop, while Office and Microsoft's Office applications and collaboration stack have Windows dependencies, Horowitz said. However, while open standards might be a draw for developers, company CIOs still favor de facto desktop industry standards, such as Office and Windows, which makes it difficult to implement new desktop technologies across the board, he added. "I love the idea of standards, but I don't get the final say," Horowitz said.
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Early user reviews of IBM&#39;s new Lotus Symphony office software suite are unlikely to be music to IBM&#39;s ears.
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A viable Vista alternative? IBM and Novell have announced an integrated open collaboration client for SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop that includes IBM Lotus Notes, IBM Lotus Sametime and IBM productivity tools to deliver advanced email and calendar capabilities, unified communication &amp; collaboration and lightweight yet powerful word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation capabilities with OpenDocument Format support.â¦
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IBM has taken the lead in lobbying against the adoption of Microsoft's Office Open XML format. But it does support the format in a few products -- a fact that some Microsoft bloggers were happy to point out.
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Everyone-hates-Redmond week It's been a good week for anyone praying for the demise of Microsoft Office. Google unveiled its long-awaited, web-based PowerPoint competitor. IBM took the wraps off the free Lotus Symphony, a complete suite of MS-battling tools. And now we have a new version OpenOffice.org.â¦
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Trilog Group this week rolled out an integrated J2EE  development framework designed to let IBM Lotus Notes developers use their existing skills for J2EE development projects.
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The development monoculture around the OpenOffice suite has, critics charge, become one of the project's own worst enemies. Now that IBM is taking the field, can that be changed in time to fend off Microsoft Office hegemony?
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Microsoft Office, software for creating documents, spreadsheets and presentations, is seeing its growth slow. Microsoft isn't pleased.