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Is IBM really serious about the office productivity space? There doesn't seem to be any buzz around their desktop offering, Lotus Symphony. [1] When I last tri

Is IBM really serious about the office productivity space? There doesn't seem to be any buzz around their desktop offering, Lotus Symphony. [1] When I last tried it, Symphony was slow and clunky to use, and miles behind LibreOffice (!) in usability. Or is there some uber-visionary long-term play going on here? I certainly don't see it. [1] http://www-03.ibm.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.nsf/home http://www-03.ibm.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.nsf/home

omh 15y ago
This is part of a wider collaboration strategy from IBM. As well as Notes, they have a "Connections" platform which is a combination of document sharing, facebook-style profiles and a few other things for internal corporate intranets. From the demos I've seen it's relatively nice, as enterprise software goes. From last month's "Lotusphere" conference it sounds like they're adding document editing to this, and aiming to move everything (including email) to an integrate web-based system. I think they're selling it as either onsite or hosted. Edit: Sorry for how corporate that sounds. I guess that's just how my mind goes when I start thinking about IBM software!
- jdp23 15y ago
  The same thing happened to me last month. I was writing up something right after reading a few IBM Tivoli and Websphere white papers and suddenly noticed I was talking corpspeak without even realizing it.
kiloaper 15y ago
Symphony was based on an old OpenOffice code base and is now dead. IBM is joining the Apache OpenOffice project and will be releasing their own IBM branded OpenOffice in the future. http://www.edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf/dx/ibm-lotus-symphony-3.0.1-is-now-available http://www.edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf/dx/ibm-lotus-symph...
- shrikant 15y ago
  This is good to know, thanks! The open productivity suite space needed some meaty corporate backing after Oracle's abandonment of OpenOffice.org, and it would've been disappointing to see a biggie like IBM further fragment the OpenOffice/LibreOffice scene. Instead they're picking a side to back with their considerable resources. This can only be a good thing (unless of course they go down the "embrace, extend, extinguish" path..)

omh 15y ago

This is part of a wider collaboration strategy from IBM. As well as Notes, they have a "Connections" platform which is a combination of document sharing, facebook-style profiles and a few other things for internal corporate intranets. From the demos I've seen it's relatively nice, as enterprise software goes. From last month's "Lotusphere" conference it sounds like they're adding document editing to this, and aiming to move everything (including email) to an integrate web-based system. I think they're selling it as either onsite or hosted. Edit: Sorry for how corporate that sounds. I guess that's just how my mind goes when I start thinking about IBM software!

jdp23 15y ago
The same thing happened to me last month. I was writing up something right after reading a few IBM Tivoli and Websphere white papers and suddenly noticed I was talking corpspeak without even realizing it.

kiloaper 15y ago

Symphony was based on an old OpenOffice code base and is now dead. IBM is joining the Apache OpenOffice project and will be releasing their own IBM branded OpenOffice in the future. http://www.edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf/dx/ibm-lotus-symphony-3.0.1-is-now-available http://www.edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf/dx/ibm-lotus-symph...

shrikant 15y ago
This is good to know, thanks! The open productivity suite space needed some meaty corporate backing after Oracle's abandonment of OpenOffice.org, and it would've been disappointing to see a biggie like IBM further fragment the OpenOffice/LibreOffice scene. Instead they're picking a side to back with their considerable resources. This can only be a good thing (unless of course they go down the "embrace, extend, extinguish" path..)