IBM Revives 'Lotus Symphony,' Supports ODF Format
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In a clever marketing move that had some of us fooled, IBM revealed today it was doing much more than beginning the process of rebuilding its own applications suite. In fact, Beta 1 of the new Lotus Symphony is already under way.
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InfoWorld - IBM has spun out productivity software included in the latest version of Lotus Notes as a free online service to compete with Microsoft&#39;s Office productivity suite.
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People apparently are already tuning in to IBM Corp.&#39;s Symphony. The company reported Wednesday that its free rival to Microsoft Corp.&#39;s Office suite was downloaded 100,000 times in the first week of release.
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Sun has released the final version of its Open Document Format (ODF) plug-in for Microsoft Office, designed to allow the ODF standard to better compete with Microsoft&#39;s dominant Office formats.
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The next generation of the Lotus Notes client will integrate with the new range of Web 2.0-inspired technologies released with IBM&#39;s social software, dubbed Lotus Connections.
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An open-source java accounting application that embeds OpenOffice and utilizes MySQL or OpenOffice's HSQLDB to create and administrate invoices, credit memos, delivery notes, bills etc.   This release is an overhaul which removes some old things which should have gone long ago (e.g. a way to book called "continuations") and introduces some features which should have been introduced long ago. It's now based on SWT 3.3 (Eclipse Europa) and NOA 2.0.9.  Code cleanups(bugs 1756730,1762621,1781961,1781967,1790963), now using SWT 3.3 (1762622) and NOA 2.0.9 (1762623), datepicker in balancewindow(1757811), dropped recordswindow and 'continuations'(1735535), credit memos are now automatically booked(1781964)  By default, this will install a new database file due to changes in the internal structure.  Download the new release at:  http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=130483&package_id=143018
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InfoWorld - It may be Valentine&#39;s Day but there are no love letters being exchanged between duelling electronic document formats, ODF (OpenDocument Format) and Open XML. Instead, Microsoft, the backer of Open XML, took a public swing at ODF supporter IBM.
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Wants your huddling masses IBM is introducing paid support for users of development tools using Eclipse, while expanding its own products running on the open source framework.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - People apparently are already tuning in to IBM's Symphony. The company reported Wednesday thatÂ its free rival to Microsoft's Office suiteÂ was downloaded 100,000 times in the first week of release. "To be honest, we were surprised at the speed with which people jumped on this," said Mike Rhodin, general manager of both IBM Collaboration and Lotus Software, in an interview Wednesday. To keep up with the number of people interested in downloading Symphony, IBM tripled the number of download servers it had for the suite of productivity applications in the first few days of its release, he said. At first, users had to sign up for an IBM ID and password and enter identity information to download the first beta of Symphony, a free suite of office productivity applications made available last Tuesday, but users complained that this process was "too onerous," Rhodin said. IBM tweaked the process so now all people need to get Symphony is a valid e-mail address. Because of this, it's been hard to track whether it's consumers or businesses that are downloading Symphony, he said. But IBM is less interested in who is using the software than in getting it into as many hands as possible, Rhodin said. Symphony is based on OpenOffice.org and the Eclipse framework and is meant not only to give consumers and businesses an alternative to Microsoft Office, but also to promote the use of ODF (Open Document for XML), an XML-based standard for documents approved by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). "The end goal here is the proliferation of the open standard," Rhodin said. Microsoft Office 2007, which has more than 90 percent market share, does not natively support ODF and instead uses the company'sÂ OOXML (Open XML) format, which failed to pass a recent ISO vote for standardization. IBM and ODF supporters like Sun and Google have been waging a public battle against Microsoft to promote their interest in ODF, on which all three companies have based productivity applications. The Microsoft competitors are hoping that because ODF is a standard and Office does not support it, more users will begin purchasing ODF-friendly software, thus giving competing players more of a chance against Microsoft's dominance in the productivity-application market. Symphony joins Sun's for-fee version of StarOffice as the latest software suite based on OpenOffice.org code to go up against Microsoft Office. So far, neither the free nor for-fee versions of OpenOffice.org have achieved any real success in cutting into Office's market share or revenue. IBM only recently joined the OpenOffice.org communityÂ after holding off for many years, and Rhodin said Symphony is not meant to be a slight against the suite that is freely available from that organization. But IBM is clearly interested in being more successful than its rivals in presenting a true alternative to Office as a way to promote ODF. "This isn't just another OpenOffice suite," he said. "We have made investments in OpenOffice.org to create an enterprise experience around it." As a part of this, IBM based Symphony on the Eclipse open-source development framework so it would be easy for third-party ISVs to build plug-in applications for the suite much like third parties have built applications for Office. In fact, one company in Brazil, Totvs, is already building an ERP application on Symphony, he said. And before Symphony was released as a stand-alone product,Â IBM had already included it in Lotus Notes 8, the latest version of its collaboration software, another arena in which it is tweaking its strategy to battle with Microsoft. Office is playing an increasingly important role for Microsoft in this market as the company hopes to leverage the ubiquity of Office among business users by making its applications the front-end interface for worker collaboration. So far, Symphony is getting decent reviews among users, and analysts think IBM, because of its successful software history, has a better chance than others at giving Microsoft Office some real competition. "IBM is the 800-pound gorilla in enterprise software, and Microsoft's main rival for information worker productivity tools," wrote IDC analyst Melissa Webster in a research report published Wednesday. "And Symphony addresses the concerns that potential OpenOffice.org users might have had in regard to using open-source software: Symphony is backed by the IBM brand and is provided as a commercially developed and supported product suite." IBM plans to release a second beta of Symphony in the next six to eight weeks with a general availability release of the software to come early next year, Rhodin said. At that time, IBM will offer enterprise support for the suite for a fee, though he acknowledged that IBM doesn't really expect to sell much of that support and is only providing it so enterprises will feel more comfortable implementing Symphony.
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With new search software for Lotus Notes announced Thursday by IBM, users will be able to find information in what the company described as "the vast personal database that e-mail has become."
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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) - IBM is to offer the world a free word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation program in yet another bid to upset the dominance of Microsoft's Office suite. The move sounds ambitious, but Microsoft is unlikely to be trembling in fear just yet --Â Lotus Symphony,Â as it will be known, is really just a re-packaging of the OpenOffice suite that has taken only fringe market share from Microsoft, since being taken under the wing of Sun seven years ago. IBM says it will contribute 35 programmers to the Symphony-cum-OpenOffice development effort, in a bid to spark new interest in a software suite that can trace its ancestry back to a suite called StarOffice, once owned by obscure German company, Star. IBM hopes its much larger corporate presence will generate more success this time. "IBM is very pleased to beÂ joining the OpenOffice.org community.Â We are very optimistic that IBM's contribution of technology and engineering resources will provide tangible benefits to the community membership and to users of OpenOffice.org technology around the world," said Mike Rhodin, of IBM's Lotus Division. "We welcome IBM's contributions to further enhancing the OpenOffice.org product. But equally important is IBM's future commitment to package and distribute new works that leverage OpenOffice.org technology supporting the ISO ODF standard," said John McCreesh of OpenOffice. IBM has been here before. In 1995, it paid $3.5 billion for Lotus Development, complete with its suite of high-regarded office applications, only for those programs to fall of the map completely as it focused on selling the OS/2 groupware, Lotus Notes, in a nice twist itself once a creation of current Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie. OpenOfficeÂ has launched version 2.3 just of its suite bang on cue for IBM's endorsement. TechworldÂ is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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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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After a few years of flirting with the idea of developing its own suite of applications, perhaps under the Lotus banner, that support the OASIS OpenDocument format, IBM has decided to join Sun Microsystems in the development of OpenOffice.org, the principal open source ODF applications suite.
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(InfoWorld) - It may be Valentine's Day but there are no love letters being exchanged between duelling electronic document formats, ODF (OpenDocument Format) and Open XML. Instead, Microsoft, the backer of Open XML, took a public swing at ODF supporter IBM. Microsoft posted an open letter on its Web site Wednesday titled "Interoperability, Choice, and Open XML," signed by two of its general managers -- Tom Robertson, who handles interoperability and standards, and Jean Paoli, responsible for interoperability and XML architecture. In the letter, Microsoft claimed that IBM is attempting to slow down the approval process by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to recognize Open XML as an international standard. IBM declined to comment publicly on the letter, but a spokesman said the company had previously addressed many of the issues raised by Microsoft. In May, ISO approved ODF as an international standard and is currently considering whether to award the same recognition to Open XML. ODF has the backing of such companiesÂ as IBM, Google, Novell, Sun, and open-source players. Open XML is the default file format for Microsoft's Office 2007 desktop applications suite. What has yet to become clear is which document format users will favor -- ODF or Open XML -- or whether they'd adopt a mix of the two. Some vendors, such as Corel, have already announced they're adopting a neutral approach and will support both formats in their software. IT users and governments around the world are expressing interest in open-standard document formats to help ensure continued access to archived information and also free them from having to use Microsoft's Office software. In December, standards body ECMA International voted 20 to 1 to approve Open XML as a global standard and submitted the format to ISO for its approval. The dissenting vote came from IBM, according to Microsoft. "IBM has declared victory in blocking Open XML," the Microsoft letter alleges, claiming that IBM is holding up the standards process in a "blatant attempt" to limit choice in the marketplace designed to favor the vendor's Lotus Notes groupware, which doesn't support Open XML. Microsoft and IBM are the two leading desktop collaboration software vendors with IBM's Notes pitted against Microsoft's Outlook and Exchange software. Microsoft is fearful that ODF may become the de facto electronic document format by default simply because it was first to achieve ISO recognition as an international standard, the letter stated. "In XML-based file formats, which can easily interoperate through translators and be implemented side by side in productivity software, this exclusivity makes no sense -- except to those who lack confidence in their ability to compete in the marketplace on the technical merits of their alternative standard," the letter continued. "This campaign to limit choice and force their single standard on consumers should be resisted." The timing of the release of Microsoft's letter is interesting given that it comes a day after the Oasis standards body announced its approval of a new version of the ODF standard, OpenDocument 1.1. The changes in ODF 1.1 are designed to address concerns voiced by advocacy groups that the previous release didn't meet the needs of people with disabilities. The level of accessibility support provided in ODF 1.1 is now on a par or exceeds that available in other file formats. Â
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IBM on Monday will unveil free developer resources for Cloudscape, a small-footprint, Java-based database that the company recently contributed to the Apache Software Foundation as an open source project.
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IBM (Quote, Chart) announced its first major database refresh in almost two years with new features from the company&#39;s autonomic computing vault.