Lotus Symphony 1.3 availability announced!

June 18 2009

Lotus Symphony 1.3 has been announced!  The press release and some early coverage are available:

IBM's alternative to Microsoft Office 2007 makes cost-free document software a legitimate option for many companies around the business world which want to realize cost-efficiencies in the current economic climate but require assurance of the quality and reliability of the technology. ...

"IBM is delivering on its commitment to free businesses and consumers from having to pay licensing fees over and over just to access their own personal or company information," said Kevin Cavanaugh, VP of Lotus Software. "Now, it will be much harder to justify paying Office licensing fees when you can preserve and access your Office documents for free using Lotus Symphony."
The press release highlights additional customers who are deploying or piloting Symphony, and the real cost savings associated with their choice.  Surveys indicate that 25% of Notes customers are piloting or deploying Symphony as part of Notes 8.x client upgrades.  A huge win for the power of the product, and its price tag.

Symphony 1.3 adds support for reading Office 2007 file formats (DOCX, PPTX, XLSX) so when your friends at Microsoft send you something, you'll be able to read it.  This was one of the remaining deployment blockers for some organizations.  The development team put a huge amount of effort into performance and fidelity of these Office 2007 format readers....way faster and better than what's in OpenOffice today.  We'll contribute back some of the key components as appropriate to the OpenOffice.org community.

There are many other improvements in Symphony 1.3, including better launch/load on the Mac, better table-of-contents generation, better mail merge, and better data pilots.  Congratulations to the entire team on their achievement.

Now, we will shift gears and focus on the next major release of Symphony, targeted for 2010.  In this version, we will incorporate the OpenOffice 3.x base, ODF 1.2 support, VBA support, and other key enhancements.  The Symphony is just warming up :-)

Link: symphony.lotus.com: Download Lotus Symphony 1.3 today >
Link: IBM: IBM Unleashes New Symphony for Millions of Microsoft Office Customers >
Link: ComputerWorld: Lotus Symphony now reads Office 2007 documents >

Ed Brill | Highland Park, IL USA Category:  Lotus Symphony  Add/View Comments [17]

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  1. 1  Carl Tyler http://www.iminstant.com | 6/18/2009 10:58:07 AM

    "IBM is delivering on its commitment to free businesses and consumers from having to pay licensing fees over and over just to access their own personal or company information"

    Does IBM plan to stop charging for Notes sometime in the future?

    The only issue I have with the argument that Symphony is free why pay for licenses, is why should I pay for any licenses from any company when there are free alternatives? Why buy Notes? I can get free email servers and clients, there are free web servers?

    How does IBM compete against the free argument with Notes?

  1. 2  Tripp Black http://www.mindwatering.com | 6/18/2009 11:19:40 AM

    @1, Another good question, is:

    Why should customers, especially when it's not free?

    For us it was e-mail reliability and apps. We also run postfix here for clients. Postfix with is Cyrus "front-end' has the same problem that Exchange has with a central store when corruption happens once or twice a year. When one user suffers mailbox corruption, it often affects/bleeds to them all. Notes doesn't have that (not inluding the 6.0 user-not-in-address-book-view-index-bug). The big reason to actually pay for Lotus Notes is apps -- We're willing to pay something for that development environment, and we do every year.

  1. 3  William Smith  | 6/18/2009 11:34:38 AM

    Ed, any word on plans to allow users to update the built in productivity editors in Notes 8.5.x via the Symphony installer? I think I remember seeing something a few months back regarding the potential of offering this type of update.

  1. 4  Bill Geimer  | 6/18/2009 2:20:01 PM

    Downloads must be going well. I cannot get into the server. Will keep trying. Its a sure sign of success, or at least excess.

  1. 5  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 6/18/2009 2:48:27 PM

    @1 it's not a commoditized space like the office productivity tools.

    @3 yes. We are doing the architectural work in 8.5.1. In that release, we will be able to build an installer that just updates Symphony going forward.

  1. 6  Henry Ferlauto http://www.geniusinside.com | 6/18/2009 3:26:28 PM

    @5 re: @3 - Nice to see.

    Ed - Is IBM going to ever try a marketing push with Symphony?

    Putting the question another way: What is IBM's big picture plan to increase the adoption of Symphony?

  1. 7  Philip Storry http://www.not-so-rapid.com | 6/18/2009 4:44:22 PM

    I have to say it's looking good.

    I'm going to stick with OpenOffice, primarily because I'm already using its versioning, and that's a deal breaker.

    But Symphony version 1.2 couldn't correctly import the formulas from one of my OOo spreadsheets, whereas version 1.3 manages it just fine.

    And I think it's worth noting that when you come from a product to another, it's easy to spot what's missing. Which makes it sound like I'm saying Symphony is worse than Office.

    It isn't. It's different. And that's very important.

    With a test Word document, OpenOffice made it look EXACTLY the same. But the semantic information - headings styles etc - was all lost. Symphony's version didn't look as pretty, but it got all the semantic information perfectly well.

    So now I have that option for when OpenOffice.org's suite fails me.

    Good times indeed! :-)

  1. 8  Darren http://www.dadams.co.uk | 6/18/2009 6:51:06 PM

    @7 - sticking with OpenOffice is great. The important thing is that you have a choice. It's just a shame that many people and businesses don't know they have a choice, they assume that if they want to create spreadsheets and documents they MUST use Office.

    I'm really pleased that I managed to get Cluttons and John Lewis to tell their stories in the press release, and we actually had another UK customer willing to do it but decided to save it for another time. When you get renowned and respected retailers like John Lewis Partnership and dynamic international companies like Cluttons talking about their plans it really starts to show the momentum is growing.

  1. 9  Phil Salm  | 6/19/2009 12:49:28 AM

    Awesome accomplishments. Petty of me in light of impressive steps forward, but I was so excited about live text. Works in documents, but doesn't appear to work in spreadsheets or presentations. Really was looking forward to potential of applications.

  1. 10  Danilo Barbuio  | 6/19/2009 1:56:22 AM

    Looks like a success ...

    no way to connect and download the program :-)

  1. 11  Michael Kobrowski  | 6/19/2009 7:38:41 AM

    Yeah, I wanted to download the new version this morning as well, and symphony.lotus.com is not responding :-(

    Good sign if the demand is high - bad sign if IBM can't host a download site!?

    Lets see..is it available in PPA?

  1. 12  Randall Shimizu  | 6/20/2009 11:23:38 AM

    Lotus Symphony is finally loading fast.

    @1 Lotus is only charging for support license.

    Like Ed said Notes is a entirely different market. IBM is giving away Symphony in order to free up companies IT budget from MS office. In doing so Lotus builds mindshare.

  1. 13  Randall Shimizu  | 6/20/2009 11:24:56 AM

    @11 I emailed IBM about the problem and it was fixed.

  1. 14  Frédéric Fanchamps  | 6/22/2009 9:06:59 AM

    Symphony "power point" is unusable: working in a presentation with only one slide triggers serveral very slow screen refresh after any action. This happens with several presentation I have tried. It is unusable (and no I'm not anti notes, see my DAOS update)

    Fred

  1. 15  Kevin Mort http://www.theglobalmind.com | 6/22/2009 10:38:22 AM

    @1 - Well it seems organizations are by vast numbers perfectly fine paying for IT software solutions, heck even the Savior Cloud Google requires you to pay to use their services.

    I'd doubt you'll see IBM or MSFT not charge for ongoing maintenance or initial purchase of their core messaging solutions.

  1. 16  Hal Ninth  | 6/26/2009 1:06:46 PM

    Deleted

  1. 17  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 6/26/2009 3:40:50 PM

    No, no comparison document. We're not really "competing" with OpenOffice.org, since we are a member and contribute code in and take code out. You should choose based on your requirements, including things like support, platforms, integration, etc.