Symphony news from the OpenOffice conference in Beijing

November 5 2008

IBM's Michael Karasick is delivering a keynote at the OpenOffice conference in Beijing right about now, and here are some of the things he's announcing:

  • Over 3 million downloads of Lotus Symphony -- 2 million of which have come since 1.0 release in May, 2008
  • Symphony 1.2, with key new features such as data pilot tables (aka pivot tables), is now available on Windows and Linux (including Ubuntu Linux), and the first Mac beta available
  • IBM plans to deliver 60 new features in Symphony updates in 2009, including Visual Basic macro support, and Office 2007 file format support.  These new releases will be developed with ODF (Open Document Format) 1.2 support and will begin use of the OpenOffice 3.0 code base
  • IBM and Sun have joined together to create the ODF Toolkit Union, at odftoolkit.org.  This site will help a broader range of ISVs build solutions that leverage ODF
  • IBM is announcing a dozen customer references for Lotus Symphony, from all over the world.  I will link to the list when it is available online on Wednesday US time

The key message to take away -- IBM is in it for the long-haul with Lotus Symphony.  Over the coming months, you will hear more about our direction for personal and organizational productivity.  We believe there is a significant amount of innovation that can be introduced in this space, as the market moves beyond office.

Will update this post with links to more information in the morning Chicago time.  What time that will be depends on just how late the celebration goes tonight....
One link before bedtime: CIO.com: Sun, IBM launch ODF tools initiative >
Update: The press release is now on ibm.com >

Ed Brill | Highland Park, IL USA Category:  Lotus Symphony  Add/View Comments [9]

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  1. 1  Mike Brown  | 11/4/2008 11:29:20 PM

    Interesting about the VB macro support. That will put the Mac version of Symphony ahead of the latest Mac version of Office, which dropped VB macro support entirely!

    Is this something that IBM is coding in itself, or is it something that it's getting as part of a later revision of OpenOffice?

    Cheers,

    - Mike

  1. 2  Albert Buendia http://slugmail.slug.es | 11/5/2008 9:44:43 AM

    Ed, these are ** excellent ** news, change we need. VB macro support was the typical user excuse for not replacing Office to Symphony. And, remember, PlanetLotus has just gone above 300 blogs, :). See you, Albert.

  1. 3  Dave Harris http://www.wavysworld.com | 11/5/2008 9:57:38 AM

    Enjoy the celebrations tonight Ed, and if you were anywhere near Grant Park, I hope it was as good as it looked on tv.

    (hearing not so good stuff from some places, though)

  1. 4  Steven  | 11/5/2008 10:42:32 AM

    Is there a corresponding road map for the versions that are in the Notes8 client? Can the "built-in" version be upgraded w/o waiting for a newer version of the Notes 8 client with the updated productivity tools?

  1. 5  Henry Ferlauto http://www.geniusinside.com | 11/5/2008 5:33:01 PM

    How about a list of those 60 features.

    I also hope with the next release we seem some concrete marketing efforts.

  1. 6  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 11/5/2008 10:14:37 PM

    @4 Good question, working on that now. There are some capabilities in Eclipse to update components through site server, but there are also base Eclipse issues and testing/interoperability concerns.

    @5 Too early to publish specific feature lists for each release -- we expect to continue the aggressive release cycle for Symphony in 2009. As for marketing..../slaps head -- what are you looking for here? It's not like we can discount the price further :)

  1. 7  Craig Wiseman http://www.wiseman.La/cpw | 11/6/2008 8:47:08 AM

    A "from in the trenches" feature request that would greatly assist in pushing the product:

    A 'skin' option that would provide menus & toolbars similar to Office 2000/2003 (and maybe WordPefect?).

    That doesn't seem .to. technically complex, yet would add the transition & adoption greatly.

    { Link }

  1. 8  Samuel deHuszar Allen http://www.essentialforms.com | 11/7/2008 5:22:26 PM

    I think this is GREAT news. I will look forward to hearing more news about the 3.x codebase rolled into the product. I can see things like OOo 3.x's PDF import allowing really cool mechanisms for data-entry. There are also some nice things like allowing cell contents that are centered to extend beyond the left border which have been sorely missed in spite of Symphony's many assets.

    Any word on when educational/training materials will start to materialize?

  1. 9  Alan Lepofsky http://www.alanlepofsky.net | 11/8/2008 12:31:17 PM

    Samuel, see here: { Link }