Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c85965)
has announced the addition of Lotus Symphony Is Back And Its Open! to
their offering.
Building on its 10 September 2007 announcement that it would join the
OpenOffice.org (OO.o) community, on 18 September, IBM announced the
general availability for download of the IBM Lotus Symphony (Symphony)
office suite based on the OO.o code base. Prior to the announcement,
Symphony functionality was available embedded in version 8 of Lotus
Notes, which was released in August 2007.
Symphony’s three components (Lotus Symphony
Documents, Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets and Lotus Symphony Presentations)
are free to download, and support PDFs as well as Microsoft Office 2003
(but not 2007 yet) document formats. Only Notes 8 users who have
Passport Advantage can currently rely on direct support from IBM; the
rest have to fall back on free moderated support forums (which IBM
promises to get involved in). However, the company is planning to offer
direct support for other customers in mid 2008. Symphony is available
under the IBM licence for non-warranted products also used in the DB2
Community Edition, rather than the IBM Public License approved by the
Open Source Initiative (OSI).
Symphony will be a major communication challenge for IBM, addressing as
it does so many areas from home user to enterprise user, open
source-biased organisations to cost-sensitive markets, and providing
editors to interface with enterprise applications.
IBM’s support will help, but is unlikely to
result in a dramatic change in OO.o adoption rates, both on its own and
as Lotus Symphony, all the more since Symphony is just a ‘Beta’
offering to start with. However, the marketing of Symphony is likely to
increase as the product moves towards General Availability (GA).
Where IBM can make a difference is in helping OO.o tackle two key
issues: integration with back-end services (from collaboration services
to ERP applications) and migration towards supporting both offline and
online functionality. The company should focus on these issues rather
than letting itself be distracted by the Open Document Format (ODF) vs.
Open XML (OXML) document format war.
Highlights:
An old name reappears, part of a relatively new initiative
A newfound anti-Microsoft attitude
IBM should wage the document format war with caution
Moving OO.o in the right direction
One step back, two steps forward?
Integration with back-end services is key…
…so is the move towards a Web 2.0 environment
Building a Lotus Symphony ecosystem will not be easy
For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c85965
Source: Ovum
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