September 19th, 2007
Lotus Symphony Relaunches as an Open Source Office Suite
By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews
Anyone remember Lotus Symphony, the DOS-based follow-up to Lotus 1-2-3? It was certainly not as successful as 1-2-3, by any stretch of the imagination, and its separate components, with the exception of the spreadsheet, naturally, were underpowered at best.
Today IBM announced it was relaunching the Symphony application suite, this time as open source, driven off of last week’s announcement of its new membership in OpenOffice.org. From today’s press release:
Beginning today at www.ibm.com/software/lotus/symphony, business, academic, governmental and consumer users alike can download this enterprise-grade office software, which is the same tool inside some of IBM’s most popular collaboration products, such as the recently released Lotus Notes 8. In addition, these tools can be used to seamlessly extend a business process or custom application to create dynamic composite applications.
We Say: There are three core applications: Symphony Documents, Symphony Spreadsheets and Symphony Presentations — and I’m sure you can guess their functions based on their names. The software supports both Open Document Format and Microsoft Office formats - though none of this should be surprising based on the OpenOffice.org roots of this suite.
Of course, OpenOffice has failed to dent Microsoft’s monopoly on office suite software to any large extent and honestly, I doubt backing by IBM will make much of a difference. To be honest, nothing IBM has ever put out (software-wise), before or after the Lotus acquisition, has ever excited me. This probably won’t do much for me, either.
John Corliss says:
The one gig ram hardware requirement for the suite means that it isn’t going to be a real hit IMO:
* Supported Windows platforms: Windows XP, Windows Vista
* Supported Linux platforms: SLED 10, RHEL 5, Redhat5
* 900MB disk space minimum
* 1GB RAM memory minimum
September 19th, 2007 at 5:00 am
marc klink says:
The additional software that will allow collaboration should be interesting - something OpenOffice.org and Sun can’t [or won’t] bring to the party.
As to nothing ever really exciting you - I’d be really excited if I could still be using OS/2 - or some derivative, instead of XP. I imagine a lot of Vista users, who’ve had it forced upon them by purchase of a new computer, would also.
September 19th, 2007 at 9:46 am
Blogger: IBM’s New Symphony ‘A Yawn’ - Open for Business says:
[…] Lotus Symphony is back — this time as a re-branded release of open source stalwart OpenOffice. According to a press release quoted at RealTechNews, the office suite (including Symphony Documents, Symphony Spreadsheets and Symphony Presentations) is available for download at IBM’s Web site. […]
September 19th, 2007 at 10:33 pm
Brant Zwiefel says:
Michael, may I ask what software does excite you? I would think any attempt at innovation in a stale, MS dominated, collaboration space would excite you….innovation that is not intended to lock you into titanic software that moved around the deck chairs (UI) and called it an upgrade… bloatware that now provides thousands of features, 85% of which I never touch. Saving $200+ on the Orifice 2007 upgrade….now that’s exciting! Back in 1981 IBM never did “anything exciting”, but the PC they introduced took personal computing from the hobby shop to the desk top. Roll forward to 2007, how is this different for Open Office?
September 20th, 2007 at 10:57 am
TellDat Blogs » Blog Archive » Presentations or Zoho, Cassette or Vinyl, One Laptop May Be The Answer. says:
[…] Lotus Symphony relaunches as open source […]
September 26th, 2007 at 8:50 pm