CRN are continuing with their ‘Top 10‘ series to wrap up 2008 with this list of ‘The 10 Coolest Open Source Products of 2008‘. This time the focus is at the open source community, that has much more to offer than (just) Linux OS. Open source products will grow bigger in market share in 2009, as companies and individuals alike are looking for ways to cut down costs. Obviously, IBM’s own Lotus Symphony, which is based on OpenOffice.org, is included in this list, coming in at #3, just after Linux OS and OpenOffice 3.0. Here’s what CRN had to say about Symphony:
IBM has taken great pains to position itself as more of a middleware company than a desktop productivity software company, but diverged from that path a bit in 2008. By launching and upgrading its IBM Lotus Symphony suite of productivity apps based on OpenOffice.org, IBM is once again using the Lotus brand to take aim against Microsoft on the desktop.
It’s been a hectic week, especially the last 2 days, and I had little time to comment about recent IBM/Lotus related events. When I saw this evening that our employee portal (w3 On Demand Workplace) has been updated with Lotus Symphony’s 2008 Product of the Year Award, I knew it was time to post.
Lotus Symphony wins CRN 2008 Product of the Year Award
Lotus Symphony acts much like Microsoft Office, which is good if you are looking for something to replace Office at a fraction of the cost (free!)… The Office 2007 installation here at the Test Center by default saves documents in the Office 97-2003 format (in the interest of backward-compatibility) so there were no problems editing files created in Symphony under Office 2007, or vice versa. The Test Center found Symphony a snap to use, and switching to Symphony after years of using Microsoft Office was painless.
Asteroid hits office building, servers are down Bilal, my colleague across the pond, has launched (along with the Lotus Foundations team of course) the first ‘official’ IBM viral campaign in recent years (‘The Art of The Sale‘ preceded it, but was more a parody than a solution advertising).
Web Conferencing in the Clouds After Lotus Notes and Domino have reached the skies, it was only a matter of time before Lotus Sametime will fly high as well. IBM’s award winning IM solution have been sporting a web version for a long time, that only improved with Web Dialogs’ acquisition. Lotus Sametime Unyte now available in version 8.2, with a new distribution partnership to InterCall’s customers around the world.
New: Lotus SocialText Community Wiki My dear friend Alan Lepofsky has started the Lotus SocialText Community Wiki, a place for Lotus lovers to contribute, connect and create pages. What can you do at the wiki?
Create you own pages. Have some information you want to share? Questions you want to ask? Feedback you want to give?
Edit pages created by others. That is what wikis are all about! Please help keep the content accurate and up to date.
Comment on pages. I know you have opinions!
Tag pages. What attributes do you think of when looking at a page?
Follow people. This will let you easily see the updates they have made.
Tag people. Find people will specific skills. Group like people together.
Customize your Dashboard. It’s all about organizing your digital world!
Slightly delayed (had a busy Wed-Thu last week), but here’s another article covering IBM’s initiative to offer Linux-based software package, that runs on a back-end server and is accessible to customers on thin clients, pricing $59-$289 (depending on level of software and service).
Customers would also save on labor costs, because moving to a server-side system would cut maintenance needs, said Inna Kuznetsova, director of Linux strategy at IBM. The server-based setup could also reduce hardware costs by extending the life spans of desktop PCs.
Earlier Nov. IBM released Symphony 1.2, which imporved the perfomance of the product, and also introduced a plugin library, specifically designed for Lotus Symphony. The next release of Symphony will be based on OO 3.0, that would allow for seamless operatibility for Office 2007 formats, and support Visual Basic macros. The latest release, 1.2, is also available for Mac OS (Beta), as well as Ubuntu Linux (Beta).
I’ve been using Lotus Symphony for several months now, and it does take some getting used to, but the features are quite the same, if you’re an average user, like me. If you’re a power user, you might miss some functionality, but there are ways to compensate for that.
The updated plugin library is a true asset, where the community shares its knowledge and expertise, with cool additions to the client. The one I liked the most is this cool one that allows you to export a presentation to a flash file (or .gif) – very nice !!
I’ve been usingLotus Symphony for several months now, both for daily use and also part of the development and translation efforts made around the product.
When talking to customers I always mentions numbers, as they provide a better indicator of a product’s success. In IBM’s case, even thou Lotus Notes 7 comes pre-installed on new machines (IBM image), there are over 80,000 employees running Lotus Notes 8.x, while our Domino servers are almost migrated fully to 8.0.1 (8.5 coming next year). There are also 140,000 Symphony users, either on Lotus Notes 8.x or the standalone software.
This is my personal blog. The postings here do not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my past employers or of my clients. It is solely my opinion.
CRN are continuing with their ‘Top 10‘ series to wrap up 2008 with this list of ‘The 10 Coolest Open Source Products of 2008‘. This time the focus is at the open source community, that has much more to offer than (just) Linux OS. Open source products will grow bigger in market share in 2009, as companies and individuals alike are looking for ways to cut down costs. Obviously, IBM’s own Lotus Symphony, which is based on OpenOffice.org, is included in this list, coming in at #3, just after Linux OS and OpenOffice 3.0. Here’s what CRN had to say about Symphony:
