The Symphony Blog: IBM now has 140,000 users on Lotus Symphony

October 10 2008

Good catch by Stuart, who saw this factoid in Chris Pepin's report on a recent presentation:

In terms of the client, there are over 80,000 employees on Notes 8.x and over 140,000 employees running Lotus Symphony - both integrated into Notes 8 and standalone.
Symphony is one of the products my new team owns.  In just a few days' time, I've learned how important Symphony is to our overall strategy.  Everyone from Steve Mills on down considers it a critical component, and part of that is to fully deploy within the IBM environment.

Aside from Stuart's observation about IBM saving money on Microsoft licenses, there's a lot more value to the IBM internal deployment.  We are focusing on this aspect of IBMers-as-cheerleaders for our own product a lot in the coming months, along with the continued fast pace of the product releases and planning.  In short, learning more about Symphony and thinking about how to have a greater impact with that product is a lot of what I've done this week, and I'm very impressed with what I've seen so far.

Link: The Symphony Blog: IBM now has 140,000 users on Lotus Symphony >

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

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  1. 1  Henry Ferlauto http://www.geniusinside.com | 10/10/2008 2:23:17 PM

    Here's one area where I hope you compliment Microsoft by copying them - Please setup a massive template library for Symphony.

    For many people there is sometimes a lack of time or skills to create nice looking and sophisticated documents.

    One of my favorite features in Microsoft Office is there now very tight integration with their on-line library of templates. So not only do they have the templates, they have made it very painless to install them as well.

    Going farther back in time, Corel did a fantastic job of amassing huge volumes of clip art (for Corel Draw!) by running a monthly drawing and having a big annual event for an awards ceremony where they gave away a $20k+ desktop publishing system.

  1. 2  H wilson  | 10/12/2008 7:33:37 PM

    Maybe it's been added recently, but the versions of Symphony I've seen do not have a MailMerge feature. Can't do mass mailings or even a Christmas letter w/o that.

    And OpenOffice's MailMerge is too basic. Sometimes MS does provide some value for the money.

  1. 3  Peter D Cox http://www.tmpl-online.co.uk | 10/14/2008 3:55:51 AM

    and you thoughtfully give me another chance to say "and what about the Mac version?". Promised when was that ????

    I am doing workshops for not-for profits and apart from encouraging them to think about 'real' applications to drive their businesses - aka hosted Notes - I recommend low or no cost ones. Well, you would, wouldn't you? And, what do you know, many in the arts sector are either mac only or mixed environments. Might not be a big sector (though with big users like banks going bust hourly maybe it's becoming more important <G>) but it's important.

  1. 4  Peter D Cox http://www.tmpl-online.co.uk | 10/14/2008 4:36:13 AM

    Only for intel Macs - but hey { Link }

  1. 5  Matthew Rees http://hamlife.blogspot.com | 10/14/2008 6:10:56 AM

    It is good to hear that Symphony is playing such an important part in IBM's future, not only are the MS products expensive bloatware they are also not very good products (I defy anybody to get their expected results when using bulleted lists!).

    I am currently a big OpenOffice fan but I also use Lotus Symphony from time to time to access my old AmiPro and Freelance documents, see { Link }

  1. 6  Darren Duke http://blog.darrenduke.net | 10/14/2008 6:41:56 AM

    I was talking to an IBMer a few weeks back and I think they put it nicely...."it is NOT eating your own dog food, it is drinking your own wine". I like that. A lot.

    Good to see this is top down, and the install numbers are nice and high. I will second the template suggestion of @1.

    Symphony still doesn't seem to like graphic intensive headers and footers created in OpenOffice Writer. Oh, and Office 2007 formats need to come too especially now that OO3 has them.

  1. 7  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 10/14/2008 8:04:59 AM

    @3/4 beta of the Mac version coming still this quarter, shipping in early 2009.

  1. 8  Stuart McIntyre http://blog.collaborationmatters.com | 10/15/2008 4:48:18 AM

    Thanks for the link, Ed.

    @3/4 There is also an update on the Mac version over on the Symphony product page. { Link }

  1. 9  Dvir Reznik http://dvirreznik.blogspot.com | 10/16/2008 6:09:56 AM

    My post on the same story has spun an interesting discussion on IBM's adoption rate for Notes and Symphony, especially around 'why only 36% and not 100%' - { Link } .