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I Can Hear Music – Lotus’s office suite gets a makeover

By Paul R Band

Paul R Band at IBM describes Lotus Symphony’s new feature-set as at the July 2010 version 3 beta 3 release. With no licensing costs Lotus a free alternative to Microsoft Office and other office suites such as OpenOffice.

What is Lotus Symphony?

IBM Lotus Symphony is a rich set of productivity tools that are intuitive and easy to use and provided at no charge.  There are three applications that make up Lotus Symphony: Lotus Symphony Documents, Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets, Lotus Symphony Presentations.  Platform support comprehensively covers Windows, several Linux distributions including Red hat, Ubuntu and SUSE and Mac OS X.  

What’s new in Version 3?

Save documents in a variety of file formats

Available since July 2010, this new version represents a major new advancement for Symphony users.  Based on current OpenOffice.org 3 code stream, it offers loads of new features and capabilities and improved file fidelity.  Symphony can save documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in a variety of file formats, including Open Document Format (ODF) and Microsoft Office 2007 formats.  Symphony can also convert documents, spreadsheets, and presentations into Adobe PDF files.

Customise your toolbar

Lotus Symphony 3 Beta 3 adds some exciting new enhancements. You can now customise the toolbars and arrange them as you like.  Creating PDF files based on your work is even easier with a one click export to PDF icon that you can add to your toolbar.  You also have the option to create toolbars to support your individual work style.  VBA script support is enhanced, much to the delight of spreadsheet users.

Files you are working on appear as tabs along the top of Symphony so all types of file (document, spreadsheet or presentation) appear together.  Symphony even has a built-in web browser.  Why is that important you might ask?  For web-based mail that updates the title bar, you can load up your mail in a tab, then continue on your documents, spreadsheets or presentation while at the same time easily seeing if any new mail comes in.  Going to your mail is just a tab away.

Clip Art and templates

The Lotus Symphony web site's Gallery contains a plethora of Clip Art items and templates that can be downloaded and you can of course create your own.

Extensibility

Extensibility is provided through plug-ins.  Symphony leverages open technology and provides an easy development and deployment environment.

For example, there is a plug-in available that will automatically convert MS Office files into Symphony ODF (Open Document Format) files. The plug-in is very efficient. You specify a source folder which contains all of your files you want to convert. Then you specify a target folder where you want the converted files placed. The plug-in will then convert all files in source folders and its sub-folders. You can specify to convert presentations, documents, or spreadsheets. Your source files are preserved.

Tools for developers

For developers, the publicly available Development Kit provides a detailed Developer's Guide, API Documentation and a number of examples of simple plug-ins.

Support is provided via discussions in the moderated Symphony support forums.  There you can request a new feature, look for answers to issues, or post a question of your own. The support forums are a great place to share your experience and to help others like you.  There are also install guides and FAQs to provide assistance.  Reference cards are available to assist Microsoft Office users to perform common tasks in Symphony.  Other chargeable support options are available should your organisation require a higher level of support.

More information

Lotus Symphony Version 3 was released in October 2010. For further information or to download IBM Lotus Symphony, visit http://symphony.lotus.com/