New plugin for IBM Lotus Symphony – Lotus Web Content Management 7.0
Now this is a neat plugin for Symphony, and one that really will improve productivity for those using Lotus Web Content Management (WCM):
IBM Lotus Symphony Plugin for Lotus Web Content Management 7.0The IBM Lotus Symphony Plugin for Lotus Web Content Management helps customers simplify the process of authoring Web Content managed and delivered by IBM Lotus Web Content Management (WCM). By introducing the concept of “profiles”, content authors can create, edit and publish rich documents from within Lotus Symphony to Lotus Web Content Management as native web content just as easily and simply just as if they were authoring local documents as normal.
In order to install and use the IBM Lotus Symphony Plugin for Lotus Web Content Management, the following steps must be completed.
1. The IT administrator deploys the WCM Rest Service on the WCM server (Part 1 ) and then creates and sets up the Public Profiles (Part 2);
2. The content author installs the Lotus Symphony Plugin for Lotus Web Content Management (Part 3), creates servers (Part 4) and private profiles (Part 5).
3. After the server and profile have been created correctly, the content author can use Lotus Symphony to create and publish (Part 6) and edit (Part 7 and Part 8) the content.There is a read me file included in the installation package, please download the package and follow the read me document step by step to install and use the plug-in. This plug-in does not support dragging to install directly from the web page.
Download here.
LotusLIve Symphony to offer online document editing and collaboration
This was one of my favourite announcements at today’s Lotusphere (#ls11) OGS – the planned release of LotusLive Symphony, a production version of IBM’s Project Concord research project.
Ed kicks us off:
Today IBM announced LotusLive Symphony, a revolution in online collaborative document editing. With a preview release later this quarter and final release later this year, LotusLive Symphony delivers word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations for users looking to improve efficiency and collaboration during the content authoring process. Like all of the LotusLive story, one of the unique differentiators for LotusLive Symphony is its ability to provide that value to interactions with customers, suppliers, and business partners in addition to colleagues within an organization.In our mind, document editing is about more than cell formulas, formatting, and animation. LotusLive Symphony offers capabilities such as real-time or private co-editing, live sections, author presence awareness, contextual commenting, assignment and notifications, and task and attention management cues. Initially designed for use with LotusLive, we are also exploring ways to deliver these capabilities in an on-premises environment through an initial customer partnership.
We announced LotusLive Symphony a year ago as Project “Concord”, and now have made significant progress and are ready for Technical Preview release 2. That will go live on Greenhouse.lotus.com after Lotusphere.
eWeek covered the announcement well:
LotusLive Symphony in the Cloud complements its on-premise, free of charge, office productivity suite, IBM Lotus Symphony. IBM has seen more than 50 million downloads of Lotus Symphony, and recently introduced updates including tighter integrations with the desktop to LotusLive allowing users to click to the cloud to get, save, share and collaborate on documents.National Bank TRUST is a social business using Symphony to collaborate on documents and transform their business processes, IBM officials said in its press release.
“The collaborative editing support and productivity gains make Symphony unique in the productivity suites market,” said Sergey Chikov, director, NB TRUST’s Board of information and banking technologies for remote sale of credit products, in a statement.
Meanwhile ComputerWorld sounded a note of caution:
With this release, IBM is joining an increasingly crowded field of Web office productivity suites. In December, Oracle launched the first version of itsown hosted office service, called Cloud Office. That version is based on OpenOffice as well. Microsoft offers consumers some basic online office document editing capability through its Office Web Apps service. It also has plans to roll this service into its enterprise-focused BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite) set of hosted services as well.
Still, very interesting announcement – I look forward to hearing more during the week…
Using Lotus Symphony? Do you need Smartsuite compatibility?
Lars Berntrop-Bos raises a request via Ed’s blog:
… Keep in mind [that when you replace the Symphony 1.x embedded in the Notes client with Symphony 3.x] you then LOSE the SmartSuite compatibility. A major oversight imho. I regret having to reverse, I rather liked Symphony 3.0.@Ed: Please, please please, I would like to ask you to reconsider. To make Symphony more universally useful I would like to be able to at least read/view/import all the file formats Symphony 1.x supports. Can you respond and/or forward this request to the appropriate person(s)?
So, dear Symphony users, is Lotus Smartsuite compatibility a requirement for you or your organisation?
Do you have lots of old Word Pro documents, 1-2-3 spreadsheets and Freelance presentations stored on file servers that you still need to be able to read and update? I’d love to know how important this requirement is…
What’s new in IBM Lotus Symphony 3 videos
These are useful overviews – I didn’t know that many of these new features were in Lotus Symphony 3:
IBM Lotus Symphony 3 Overview
A useful overview of what’s in the newly released Lotus Symphony 3.
(I’m trying to track down a higher resolution version of this and will update this post as soon as I find it!) Found it – thanks Eric!
Whats new in Lotus Symphony 3?
The list of what’s changed between Lotus Symphony 1.3 and Lotus Symphony 3 is probably better articulated as ‘what hasn’t changed’ – it really is a complete line-by-line rewrite to take in the changes in the OpenOffice 3 code.
However, there is a detailed list in the Release Notes for Symphony 3 – here are the changes to the overall suite:
New Features
• VBA scripts support
• ODF 1.2 standard support
• Office 2007 OLE support
• Brand new sidebars containing enriched property sections and panels across different editors, with support of sidebar panel management to show or hide sidebar panels
• Ability to customize toolbar content and layout
• Ability to create new business cards and labels
• Ability to insert OLE, audio and video files
• Master document support
• Support of Live Text
• Enabled file encryption and password protection with Microsoft Word and Excel files
• Support for “Open in new window”. Users can use Command+~ on Mac OS and Alt + Tab on XP/Vista to switch windows
• New clip art gallery
• More template files
• Support of VML images in OOXML files
• Support of more parameters for protecting spreadsheet files and sheets in VBA API
• Support of separate downloads of spell check dictionary addons for 22 languages for Windows OS users
• Support of same build re-installation in silent mode on Windows
• Support of online check of new product updates
Enhancements
• Better graphic object rendering through improved anti-aliasing
• Refined main menu and toolbar design for better usability and consistency across editors
• Ability to open a file by dragging and dropping it to a tab or empty workbench
• Better usability during the operation of dragging graphic objects
• Enhanced the usability in manipulating color property with new color picker controls
• Enabled new progress bar to launch and load/save files
• Enabled memorizing user file paths when inserting objects into file
• Added one click link to LotusLive website on homepage
• Improved accessibility support for graphic objects in files and help
• Various additional user experience enhancements
• Significant enhancement in online help content and structure
Impressive, huh?
For the rest of the list, check below the fold, or else the Release Notes themselves.
Still with us? Here’s the rest of the list:
Document editor
New Features
• Enabled native nested tables support.
• Enabled multi-page view layout support.
• Support of Auto Text
• More fields support
• Custom properties
• Outline levels within paragraph
Enhancements
• Enhanced PDF export support.
• Improved document notes function.
• Enhancements in supporting much more types of fields in documents.
• Ability to select rectangle region of text in document editor.
• Ability to set bullets and numbering in multiple table cells at a time.
• Document header and footer function enhancements and usability improvements
• Enhanced the interoperability with MS Word documents that contains page grid layout content
Spreadsheet editor
New Features
• Extended maximum number of columns from 256 to 1024.
• Sheet specific zoom support.
• Text to column value convert support.
• Detective function.
• Solve equations and solver.
• ”What if” function.
• Inline array constants in formulas.
• Dynamic ranges in validation lists.
• More formulas.
Enhancements
• Improved sort and formula performance.
• Enhancement in moving rows or columns easily through dragging column headers.
• Ability to select multiple sheets.
• Formula hot hints.
• Flexible source range selection
• Enabled multiple calculation in one sheet of the Lotus Spreadsheet editor, including mixed sort and filter, as well as multiple sort areas.
• Enabled sorting instant filters in Lotus Spreadsheet
• Enhanced functionality and usability in “import data from external file” function
• Enhanced the support of auto selection in files with built-in database ranges
Presentation editor
New Features
• Multi-monitor display support.
• More presentation animation effects.
• More page layouts.
• More drawing objects.
• More fontwork.
• Support of copy and paste pages or objects together with animation effects.
Enhancements
• Significantly improved user experience in managing and using templates.
• Enhancement in slide show effect through hardware acceleration for graphics.
• Improved crop feature.
• Support of switching between four different views in presentation by clicking tabs at the bottom of the screen.
• Disabled Autosave during Lotus Presentation slide show to avoid the unexpected interruption
• Enhanced the Presentation text objects undo and redo function
Chart
New Features
• Significantly improved chart experience through new chart engine.
Enhancements
• New chart creation wizard.
• Many newly added formatting options.
• More chart types: Column and Line, Cylinder, Cone, Pyramid…
Symphony 1.3 features disabled in Symphony 3 releases
• Ability to import SmartSuite files.
• Freehand table.
• Presentation print preview.
• Ability to create new XForm document
• Connector support in document editor
Key Bug Fixes
Symphony Forum
• The animation effects including wipe, appear, motion path in Microsoft Powerpoint sample file don’t work properly when opening the sample file with Lotus Symphony.
• Creating a document containing the empty “Numbering style” by Lotus Symphony 3, when opening the file with Lotus Symphony 1.3, it crashes.
• Absolute references in conditional formatting are not adjusted when the cell is moved.
• When selecting one column, click the instant filter and then choose a value, all the lines which contain the value are displayed. But when all the lines are selected and the values are changed, the values in other lines are also changed unexpectedly.
Mac
• Some OLE objects can not be displayed properly on Mac OS.
• Hidden files and hidden directories are displayed in File-Open dialog in Lotus Symphony.
Language Related Fixes
• When copying part of the spreadsheet as DDE link and pasting it to Lotus Symphony Document, Hebrew characters will be lost.
Lotus Symphony Document
• Open some MS Word 2007 files in Lotus Symphony, the size of the bullet indents in table and the text indents in footer are bigger than the size in MS Office 2007.
• Open some MS Word 2003 file in Lotus Symphony, the pictures and logs in header and footer are lost.
• Opening the sample file in Lotus Symphony, compared the result with Microsoft Word, the position of tables has been moved to the left.
• The texts on the left side of a table are truncated when saving Lotus Symphony Document sample file as MS Word file and open it with Lotus Symphony again.
• Hyperlinks targeted in the same document don’t work well.
Lotus Symphony Presentation
• Can not export all slides as JPG graphic format in Lotus Symphony.
• If a Presentation sample file is created by Lotus Symphony 1.3 and it contains the drawing objects, open the sample file and save it in Symphony 3 Beta 4, the connectors will be messed up.
• Duplicate formatting does not work in Lotus Symphony Presentation in some scenarios.
• Lotus Symphony Presentation freezes when loading the sample files which contain thousands of hyperlinks.
• Open sample file in Lotus Symphony Presentation, the texts in table can not be replaced through the Find and Replace dialog.
• Lotus Symphony 1.3 hang when opening a presentation file which contains more than 9 level of outlines.
• When importing the template *.otp file to the template organizer, the appearance becomes untidy.
• Connector will not be moved along with the grouped shapes in Lotus Symphony Presentation.
• In Lotus Symphony Presentation, new three shapes in one slide, and group two of them. Create a connector to connect them, the grouped shapes are the start point. Copy or duplicate the slide. In the second slide, move the grouped shapes, the connector is detached from the grouped shapes.
Lotus Symphony Spreadsheet
• When changing the value of a cell in the filtered column, value of the unfiltered rows are also affected.
• Resizing the grouped objects can not change the pointers of callout objects as expected.
• Open MS Excel file with Lotus Symphony, the result of calculation will be “#div/0!” if the referenced cells are strings.
• The output of COUNTIF formula in Lotus Symphony is different from the output in Microsoft Excel.
• Lotus Symphony prompts err:508 instead of the actual output when opening the Microsoft Excel sample file.
• Open a Microsoft Excel sample file with Lotus Symphony, users will get “General Error” when double-clicking an OLE object.
General usage
• After deleting multiple cells in Lotus Symphony spreadsheet, not all of them can be recovered by using the undo function.
• If a file is locked by OpenOffice, this file is in read-only mode when opening with Lotus Symphony.
• Sometimes when Lotus Symphony crashes, restart it for the first time, a blank recovery dialog is popped up.
• It took several minutes to complete spell check for a sample file.
• Inserting graphic as a link to one file and export the file as PDF format, the linked graphics are not exported to the PDF file.
• Cannot copy/paste pictures from Paint.NET to Lotus Symphony.
Lotus Symphony 3 now available for download
As promised, the new release of Lotus Symphony is up on the site and available for download today.
Based on the OpenOffice version 3 code, this is a massive step forward for Symphony, with much improved UI, increased fidelity with both OpenOffice and Microsoft Office formats, read support for Office 2007/2010 documents and much more. Symphony 3 is available for Windows XP/Vista/7, Mac OS X 10.6, and SUSE/RedHat/Ubuntu Linux.
Lotus Symphony 3 to be released tomorrow!
We have just had word that the GA release of Lotus Symphony 3 will be available tomorrow, that’s 21st October 2010, from the Symphony website.
Excellent news!
Lotus Symphony 3 discussed on This Week in Lotus podcast
Two members of IBM’s Lotus Symphony team joined Darren Duke and I on the This Week in Lotus podcast this week to discuss the latest news regarding the upcoming Lotus Symphony 3 release:
Guests:
David Pearson (twitter | email) is a senior architect in the IBM Software Services for Lotus Centre of Excellence, and is also IBM’s worldwide services leader for Symphony. He has been at Lotus / IBM for 14 years.
Eric Otchet (email) is currently the Product Manager for Lotus Symphony. He has been with IBM for over 22 years and has held both technical and sales positions during that time.
Topics included:
Symphony 3 launch:
- What is IBM Lotus Symphony ?
- How did Symphony come about?
- What is IBM’s strategy ?
- Can you describe the Symphony roadmap ?
- What is the relationship with the OpenOffice community ? What does IBM do with OpenOffice Code ?
- Will split in OO movement help or hinder (LibreOffice)? Does IBM feed back into OO code?
- What are the key differences between OpenOffice and Symphony ? Is there round-trip compatibility?
- How Does Symphony link into the rest of the Lotus portfolio ?
- When will Symphony v3 be available ?
- What are the key new things in Symphony v3 to get excited about ?
- Once Symphony 3 ships, can we integrate it into (and over) the current Lotus Notes Symphony install?
- What is Project Concord and how does that integrate with Symphony ?
- Any plans to extend Symphony to include Draw and give us a real Visio replacement? Or a database?
- When will be able to save as docx, xlsx and pptx?
- Quickr connectors? Coming? Dates?
- Get more information from symphony.lotus.com
Link: This Week in Lotus 022 – Symphony 3 – Free, Free, Free!!
Lotus Symphony 3 Beta 4 now available
Lotus Symphony 3 Beta 4 is now available! Give it a try. Tell us what you think.Lotus Symphony 3 Beta represents a major new advancement for our Lotus Symphony users. Based on current OpenOffice.org 3 code stream. Lotus Symphony 3 Beta offers loads of new features and capabilities and improved file fidelity. The Lotus Symphony team is excited to get it out to you and get your feedback.
Lotus Symphony 3 Beta 4 adds some exciting new enhancements. We’ve focused on performance. In addition we’ve enabled the support for adding additional spell check dictionaries into the product and added support for VML images.
We’ve done some additional work around installation to support a silent installation option for Windows. We’ve added some enhancements to the user experience like remembering file paths when you insert objects and some enhancements to the import data functions.
This is our last planned Beta so your feedback is really important to us.
So, download Lotus Symphony 3 Beta 4 today and try it out.
We do caution you though, as with all betas, there are still some kinks to work out before we’re finished. So, please treat this as beta code and not production code. And, please take care to choose the right forum for support and feedback.