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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Software giant tailors new version of office suite for small-business users.
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IBM is turning to technology from Siemens to help bring Sametime, part of its Lotus Notes messaging and collaboration suite, up to par with Microsofts upcoming Office Communications Server 2007.
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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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The next version of Lotus Notes and Domino will ship in February and will feature an array of updates, including a new Web 2.0-style feature called My Widgets, IBM said Monday during its Lotusphere show in Orlando, Florida.Lotus users will have a new panel for different types of widgets. Their interaction with the mini-programs will be enhanced through a technology, Live Text, that can analyze text, spot patterns and phrases, and then link them to a widget that could be useful. For example, users could receive information about flights after clicking a flight number in an e-mail, IBM said in a statement.The Lotus Notes and Domino 8.0.1 release will also include Lotus Notes Traveler. The application will be able to push e-mail -- including associated content like attachments and calendars -- to Windows Mobile devices, IBM said.In addition, IBM unveiled a new e-mail security appliance, IBM Lotus Protector for Mail Security; and said the fourth beta of its free desktop software suite, Lotus Symphony, will be available by the end of this month.Symphony has seen more than 400,000 users download the English version, IBM said. The software is available in 24 languages overall. IBM said a new plug-in, WebSphere Translation Server, will be available on the Symphony community site. The tool can provide real-time translation of content created in Symphony, according to IBM.IBM also looked further down the road, saying that Lotus Domino Designer 8.5 will feature more Web 2.0-style capabilities, such as AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) programming, and RSS or ATOM content feeds.The company&#39;s news comes as rival Microsoft is crowing about its success in luring Lotus users to its unified communications and collaboration platform.Also Monday, IBM company also announced its Open Collaboration Client Solution will come in a version compatible with the Linux-based Ubuntu operating system.The Open Collaboration Client Solution bundles together Lotus Notes; the Lotus Sametime messaging platform; Lotus Symphony; WebSphere Portal; the Lotus Connections social networking software; Lotus Quickr, document management and collaboration software for teams; and Lotus Expeditor, an Eclipse-based development environment.In addition, IBM and Red Hat announced a new partnership aimed at SMBs. The companies plan to sell an offering that combines Red Hat&#39;s Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform and Enterprise Linux Desktop with IBM&#39;s Lotus Notes client, Symphony, and Domino server.
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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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(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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Free downloads BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) confirmed yesterday that it plans to offer a free download of IBM's Lotus Connections biz social networking software later this year.â¦
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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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In a sign of the growing movement for alternatives to the industry-dominating Microsoft Office suite, IBM said Wednesday that more than 100,000 registered users downloaded the beta of its free office productivity software, Lotus Symphony, in its first week.
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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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BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd   plans to offer IBM's  Lotus Connections  business networking software as a free download later this  year, the company said on Wednesday.
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Lotus Notes and Domino 8 appear less complicated for IT staff to manage and make it easier for developers to build on the collaboration capabilities in the rich Web 2.0-style client.
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After spending more money than any other company to thwart Microsoft's Open XML document-standard aspirations, IBM turns out to actually be supporting them... in a handful of products.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM will begin delivering on its Jazz vision for collaborative application development Monday with the introduction of collaborative portal software intended to boost team productivity. Called IBM Rational Team Concert, the software is one of a series of product and program introductions planned for the IBM Rational Software Development Conference 2007 event in Orlando, Fla. IBM also will expand its Jazz.net Web site to enable users to check out Jazz-related projects and offer input. The Jazz Project focuses on collaboration across geographic boundaries and is based on Eclipse technology. With Team Concert, which currently is in a beta form, IBM is producing a portal optimized for agile development teams in mid- and large-sized businesses. IBM plans a family of Concert offerings and extensions to existing IBM products geared toward collaborative, team-based development. "It's a real-time, collaborative portal for improving the productivity and innovation of software delivery teams," said Scott Hebner, vice president of marketing and strategy for IBM Rational. Developers using Team Concert can collaborate in real time based on the context of the work they are doing. For example, if a requirement were changed, other developers would automatically be notified of the change, Hebner said. "[The change] would automatically show up in the code," he said. "It's more real-time linkage of the artifacts." Instant messaging capabilities will be featured in Team Concert. To bolster real-time collaboration, IBM will offer adapters to tie Team Concert to IBM's ClearCase source code management tool and the ClearQuest work item manager. Developers and customers can participate in the development of Team Concert through Jazz.net, Hebner said. General availability for Team Concert is set for the first half of 2008. With Jazz.net, IBM is expanding access to Jazz technology beyond the dozen or so customers who have had it so far. "We're opening up the Jazz.net community to Rational customers so they can get access to the technology," Hebner said. "We're going to be developing the products in a more open and transparent fashion." At the conference, IBM also will unveil "incubator" technologies based on Jazz that are focused on agile development. Incubator offerings are prototype technologies that may or may not become products; they will be offered for such purposes as story authoring, which is an agile development concept in which software projects are described in an evolving story format rather than relying on format requirements management. Incubators also are planned for team reporting, code analysis, and process authoring.Â  IBM describes Jazz as falling into the domain of ALM (application lifecycle management) 2.0, which features agility and greater flexibility. The company believes the open forum approach to its Jazz Project is different than what ALM rival Borland Software is doing, Hebner said. Borland also lacks infrastructure to bolster geographically distributed development, he claimed. HP's Mercury technology, meanwhile, does not offer a development environment, he said. An analyst expressed high hopes for IBM's efforts. "I am very bullish on Jazz," said Carey Schwaber, senior analyst at Forrester. "What Jazz does is gives you one interface to all the data about the project," Schwaber said "I think this is an opportunity for IBM to really re-take market leadership in the development tool space," said Schwaber. With its collaboration capabilities, Jazz is offering what Borland seeks to provide, Schwaber said. Mercury, meanwhile, has focused on bookending the development process with requirements management and testing but has not done much in ALM, she said. Also at the conference, IBM plans to announce products to support collaboration by geographically distributed development teams. Featured is Web-centric, lower-bandwidth software to reduce overhead costs of deploying clients. As part of this effort, IBM is announcing availability of IBM Rational Asset Manager, which provides intelligence into software assets and how they are consumed in a collaborative environment, on June 29. The Asset Manager software features a registry of design and development assets, such as codes, patterns, and tests. Organizations can reduce cost and time and communicate across disparate global teams. Also at the conference, IBM is unveiling version 7.01 of IBM Rational ClearCase. This product helps isolate data based on the location of a user, which can be critical in cases where a user is in a country with export controls preventing work on certain aspects of code. IBM also has built a plug-in focused on geographically distributed development teams for IBM Rational Composer 7.2. The Composer offering features a process helping developers deliver customized, consistent software development projects. Development teams from the IBM Lab in Bangalore, India, meanwhile, have published a Redbook entitled "Global Development and Delivery in Practice: Experiences of the Rational India Lab." The material, accessible here, covers common challenges in geographically distributed development environments and the steps IBM took to tailor Rational tools to solve these problems.SEE ALSO:IBM advancing global-based software developmentIBM Jazz-ing up collaboration
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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 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.