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Hardly vaporware: The IBM Lotus team has a very stable beta of "IBM docs" online on the web in their lab. I literally use it every day.

Public information at https://greenhouse.lotus.com/wpsgh/wcm/connect/ghcontent/lotus+greenhouse+next+site/home/labs/ibm+docs+

Yeah the article says:

they used several standard industry benchmarks to compare Windows 8 performance with that of Windows 7 running on the same machine

But they don't mention anything about McAfee, Norton Antivirus, Lotus Notes[1] and Industry Standard Crapware/Craplets (see Sony, Dell, HP etc ). ;).

[1] I don't use Lotus Notes, but I do hear many grumbles about it: http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/dominowiki.nsf/dx/lotus_notes_cold_start_observations

Link for the lazy: Lotus Symphony

I installed Linux to my brother a couple weeks ago (he's an accountant). The next day he said he hated OO (the old "I can't find what I need" argument). He's the kind of user who is not afraid of playing around with new things, but he told me that the GUI just wasn't attractive enough to make him do it. So I decided to install Lotus Symphony it's less powerful (in terms of features, since they're stuck in a not-so-new version of OO, but release fixpacks periodically) but my brother felt in love with the nice icons and the general layout (he opens many windows at a time, so SDI mode is just fine for him).

PS.: Yes, pasting in the /. 2.0 sucks

Use IBM Symphony http://symphony.lotus.com/ . It is based upon Open Office but IBM has added a few of it's own features to it.

You could try this: http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.nsf/home

Although, if you've had bad experience with Oracle, maybe you've had bad experience with IBM, as well.

This is a new Symphony, entirely unrelated to the old product, build on top of Eclipse technologies and forked OpenOffice code.

http://symphony.lotus.com/

Right - because, as we all know, OS/2 is fully compatible with Windows NT-based systems, especially ones as recent as Windows 7. We also know that Novell's commercial support for SUSE and Canonical's support for Ubuntu don't count as "commercial support". We also know that MS' current "Would you like Aero with that?" choice between XP and 7 is not a choice of multiple, wildly divergent interfaces at all, just as we also know that resurrecting a nearly 20 year old desktop paradigm that nobody liked in the early '90s will go over swimmingly today. Also, just for kicks, choosing between GNOME and KDE is so incredibly difficult for most people, especially since most desktop-oriented Linux distributions use GNOME these days as their default (SUSE being a notable exception).

Snarkiness aside, there are many reasons why desktop Linux is floundering and why Apple's market share is gaining, but it has little to do with anything IBM can fix. First off, you don't need Windows compatibility - you need native compatibility with Windows programs. In Apple's case, they have a version of MS Office. It's probably less compatible with MS' own file formats than OpenOffice, but it has the name "Microsoft" as part of its brand and that counts for a lot with many. Apple also enjoys native versions of several other popular Windows programs that people have to use for work or play, including Adobe's Creative Suite, as well as several other programs out there. Yes, there are a dizzying array of open source projects that mimic (if not outright exceed at times) the functionality of these closed source programs, but you have to know which ones map up to which and trust that the open source version of the program won't subtly break your work when you least expect it. IBM, I'm sorry to say, doesn't make any of the programs that we're talking about, so there's not much they can do about it. As proof, I submit the current level of "popularity" enjoyed by Lotus Symphony.

Now, let's talk about commercial support. Yes, IBM can certainly provide that, as can (and are) a ton of other support providers out there. Realistically, though, most people don't use commercial support; I mean, when's the last time you heard of someone calling Microsoft because their computer got a virus? The only company that provides real post-purchase support that home users consider using is Apple; on the flip side, Apple's commercial support is abysmal, while HP's and Dell's is comparatively fantastic. IBM would undoubtedly be able to keep up with Dell/HP/etc. as far as business support goes, but would have a heck of a time building up the sort of infrastructure that Apple has on the ground for generic consumer support, especially since IBM isn't currently "hip" or "trendy". Honestly, Apple is the only consumer electronics brand that can actually support its own store - Gateway, Sony, and Microsoft have all failed. I'd be rather pleasantly surprised if IBM didn't fall in the latter category.

Okay, now, let's talk about the standard interface. Though there are, of course, a ton of UIs out there for the more technically savvy to look at, the only two that will matter to most people are KDE and GNOME, with most major distributors focusing on GNOME these days (thanks, KDE 4!). Consequently, if you're a programmer and you target GNOME, you're going to hit well over half of the Linux desktop market (the vast majority of Ubuntu users and a good chunk of Fedora). Now, things could change once GNOME 3 comes out, but that's rapidly starting to look like a standard to me. Not that it really matters, though - MS and Apple have both changed their interfaces significantly over the past few years and people have generally lived with the changes.

Personally, I think that, if Linux is going to grow on the desktop (and I'm not entirely sure that it should, at least not right now), the best thing it can do is stop treating commercial software li

As for OpenOffice accessibility, kiss it goodbye on Linux.

Meanwhile, IBM makes available Lotus Symphony for free(also available as a component of Notes 8+). Which fully supports OpenDocument standards, as well as Office 2007. And is also accessibility compliant, as are all other IBM products (due to previously mentioned US govt. standards). And is available on Windows, Ubuntu and Mac OS.

Of course Symphony isn't perfect, it has its drawbacks as well.

I haven't tried it myself, but have you tried Lotus Symphony (mentioned in a previous post)? http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.nsf/home

Sounds pretty normal for Microsoft.

I use IBM's Lotus Symphony package, myself. Good support, and it "looks" far better than OpenOffice (which sometimes makes all the difference when you're trying to convince someone to use it. That, and it's got native Mac, PC, and Ubuntu versions.

Wow, that's crazy. Why did you bother going to all that trouble when IBM's already done it for you?

If you don't like Symphony, there's plenty more choices. That's the great thing about being open and having competition, right?

Also, when Lotus Notes crashes (which we know it *never* does) I don't have to restart my computer to coax it into working again.

To get past the "error opening window" after a crash, open Task Manager and end ntaskldr.exe and ntmulti.exe. There is also the KillNotes tool which can kill off all the processes that use the Notes DLL automatically.

When OO 3 came out, it severely broke spreadsheets in Symphony. It wasn't until Symphony 1.3 came out, something like 9 months later, that Symphony gained the ability to handle spreadsheets from OO 3.

Yet if you Google for information on the problem, you'll find pretty much nothing. That one thing in the Lotus forum is the only mention I've found of it.

I conclude from the fact that such a major incompatibility could go virtually unnoticed by most of the OO and Symphony user communities for so long that either almost no one uses Symphony, or Symphony users are closed groups that don't need to exchange documents with outsiders who use OO.

Well Yahoo Answers has a link to A Lotus Smartsuite FTP Site click on KVLOTUS.EXE and it will be a Lotus Smartsuite viewer. You can then load .LWP files and then copy and paste them to any sort of office suite or word processing program and then save as that format.

That is if you decide not to use Lotus Symphony. In this listed features

Interoperability with SmartSuite documents

        * Added supports to load SmartSuite customer files.
        * Improved support for graphic and layout.

IBM would have to be pretty stupid to abandon Lotus Smartsuite and not make Lotus Symphony work with the old legacy data files.

It is free to download you can download it right here and then start to work on your old Lotus Wordpro files and convert them to ODF format one by one.

Well Yahoo Answers has a link to A Lotus Smartsuite FTP Site click on KVLOTUS.EXE and it will be a Lotus Smartsuite viewer. You can then load .LWP files and then copy and paste them to any sort of office suite or word processing program and then save as that format.

That is if you decide not to use Lotus Symphony. In this listed features

Interoperability with SmartSuite documents

        * Added supports to load SmartSuite customer files.
        * Improved support for graphic and layout.

IBM would have to be pretty stupid to abandon Lotus Smartsuite and not make Lotus Symphony work with the old legacy data files.

It is free to download you can download it right here and then start to work on your old Lotus Wordpro files and convert them to ODF format one by one.

Well Yahoo Answers has a link to A Lotus Smartsuite FTP Site click on KVLOTUS.EXE and it will be a Lotus Smartsuite viewer. You can then load .LWP files and then copy and paste them to any sort of office suite or word processing program and then save as that format.

That is if you decide not to use Lotus Symphony. In this listed features

Interoperability with SmartSuite documents

        * Added supports to load SmartSuite customer files.
        * Improved support for graphic and layout.

IBM would have to be pretty stupid to abandon Lotus Smartsuite and not make Lotus Symphony work with the old legacy data files.

It is free to download you can download it right here and then start to work on your old Lotus Wordpro files and convert them to ODF format one by one.

This is why the interface should be distinct from the core. They should just focus on writing a good word processing engine, and let others design user interfaces for it.

It's open source, so you are of course welcome to take the word processing engine from it and stick a different user interface on it if you like -- as, indeed, IBM's Lotus have

Link for all you lazy people:
http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.nsf/home

Weir's tests of MS's ODF implementation made a big point of the fact that if you saved a spreadsheet in OO, and read it with Office, it was not fully functional (you get the cell values, but not the formulas, so it becomes a static snapshot of the data).

Yet Lotus Symphony has almost exactly the same problem. Weir got around that by using a beta of a future version of Symphony that fixes the problem.

Lotus Symphony is based on OOo, and the various OOo programs are integrated into Lotus Notes 8 Standard as optional Productivity Tools.

Ask and you shall receive. Thats right, IBM has already made an OpenOffice-based Lotus suite.

I doubt there will be much "vs" to it.

Solaris and AIX have their own weak and strong points, so combining the strengths is the logical choice.

MySQL could become a low-end IBM DB with DB2 at the high end. They could both pick up each other's dialects of SQL so that eventually a database abstraction layer (or all those programmers silly enough not to use one) could treat either one the same. Only the DBA would have to care about the differences.

Lotus Symphony already uses OpenOffice code along with Eclipse code, so that's not much of a versus situation.

IBM's Word processor is based on OpenOffice.

From http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.nsf/products:

  Lotus Symphony is based on OpenOffice.org Technology and supports the ODF standard, ISO 26300

Remember Lotus Symphony? It's vying for a comeback.

It's not your dad's Lotus Symphony, though. This version was dubbed OpenOffice in Eclipse Clothing.

Get Crossover Office, it's defiantly worth the money. I use Microsoft Office 2007 of my Linux laptop. OpenOffice just doesn't cut it. Symphony is also a nice, Linux compatible, alternative to OO.

Actually IBM gives Symphony away without charge... http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.nsf/products

I prefer IBM's new Lotus Symphony, I mean it has tabs and it is based on openoffice.

Well, you know, some kids either

A: Have realized that when compatibility with the outside world counts, especially with VBA, Microsoft Office Wins.

Hmm. We should teach (or learn) only Microsoft products because we know that's all anybody will be using when the kids get out of school.

Sounds like self-fulfilling prophesy to me.

Unfortunately not everybody has the learning curve of a hardened Geek. To ask them to be masters of two different office suites is asking an awful lot.

... Which is why we like Microsoft products. They maintain an amazing amount of consistency from one product to the next; why, moving from Windows 3.11 to Windows 9x or NT to Windows 2000 to Windows XP to Windows Vista, they can't have changed more than 95% of their UI in each transition!

It's not like moving from one version to the next requires complete retraining, oh no.

So better teach kids this year's Microsoft Orifice, it won't have changed more than 3 times before they graduate.

...Kindergarten.

... Actually, I exaggerate. (Slightly.) Most companies drag their feet on upgrading. ... Probably because a) Microsoft adds features faster than they solve bugs and b) upgrading requires not only buying new licenses for everybody in the company, but massive retraining, not to mention the time installing the new OS/Office suite/whatever, and fixing the problems that inevitably come up when they do.

Which is why Microsoft tries so hard to force you to upgrade by breaking backwards-compatibility.

... That said, I don't always find that OO does what I want. I don't know if it's because I'm more used to Microsoft or if it's because I'm running into limitations of OO. Probably some of both.

At home I'm using a combination. Company I worked for binned a copy of Word 2000, so I now have a ligit copy. I'm playing with Gnumeric right now for my spreadsheet needs. As for Powerpoint, I don't need it and don't use it, and consider it a crime against humanity. How often does a PP show actually add anything of significance to a presentation? Most of the time it's just a distraction. Oh, I KNOW there's information that is better presented visually, but most of the presentations I've sat through would have done better without the damned slide show.

OK, I need to cut this rant short, I'm late taking my meds. ;) I just get tired of hearing about how Microsoft world takeover is inevitable. And the products that are challenging it are mostly coming from behind. Give them time. Give them a chance.

BTW, anybody want to try Symphony? You can get it for free from IBM, registration required. http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.nsf/home Funny thing, I've got my copy sitting in my download directory. Haven't tried it yet, to be honest. I really need to do that.

Happy holidays.

Are you talking about lotus symphony? I wouldn't bother. I haven't actually tried lotus symphony, but I HAVE to use lotus notes and notes is just terrible.

Dude, Symphony might suck giant donkey balls, or make users so happy they crap rainbows, but either way, since you haven't even tried it, of course your opinion is "relatively worthless" -- I'd even go so far as to say "completely worthless". Sheesh. At least try it out before slagging it.

(And no, I don't care about Symphony one way or the other -- something about this "I've never used it but I'm still qualified to bitch about it" attitude just pisses me off.)

Cheers,

Like IBM Lotus Symphony? It's based on very old version of OO.org and it's closed source though.

Are you talking about lotus symphony? I wouldn't bother. I haven't actually tried lotus symphony, but I HAVE to use lotus notes and notes is just terrible. I Can think of so many other solutions (with and without java) that would work better. But IBM paid X million dollars for a groupware software suite and they'll be damned if they don't use it. Frankly, I think something based on google docs and google gears would work MUCH better and have far less problems. But alas, I am but a peon whose opinion relatively worthless.

I keep meaning to install the latest version of IBM's Lotus Symphony. The last version I installed impressed me for having resolved some of the issues that prevent me from using OOo -- I'm a Japanese-English translator, so getting accurate word / character counts is vital, and OOo completely drops the ball on this one, but Symphony actually gives me useful count data. I'm not sure about Outline view, but it wouldn't surprise me if Symphony did this better than OOo, too. Plus, Symphony apparently uses a good bit of the OOo codebase, and it reads and writes ODF and MSO files. The downsides are that it's still slow to start (possibly because it's built on top of the Eclipse platform), and I'm not sure about its status as FOSS. It's certainly free-as-in-beer, at least. You might find it's worth taking a look.

(Note that I have no relation to IBM at all. I'm simply a former OOo user frustrated by the glacial pace of improvements, and happy to find an ODF-based alternative that seems to actually work. :)

Cheers,

Thanks for the Micheal Meeks link, that was very informative and in line with what I have observed in following OOo since its 1.0 days -- requirements are too cumbersome, the docs too byzantine, and developers simply can't be bothered to put up with all the extra hurdles that get in the way of contributing. Meeks's analysis shows a decline in the OOo developer community, which seems to be an unfortunate, albeit completely understandable, response to Sun's poor management of the project. I hope at least that some OOo derivative might work out -- perhaps NeoOffice, or IBM's Lotus Symphony.

Cheers,

Nope I am not. For me it takes approx 7 seconds from when I double click. I am sure if you have a slower machine then it will take longer. But it is no where near the time it takes for 8.0.1 to load up.

Dug out the speed specs for you.
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/nd85forum.nsf/7756aedc25e6d81285256324005ac76c/052c096c9efbf8a8852574aa006bbca3?OpenDocument

> Lotus sucks

As mentioned you are probaly talking about notes. Lotus covers a wide range of products like connections, quickr, Sametime, Symphony.

I also suspect you are talking about an older version of notes. Currently out in the wild you have version 6 to 8 (pre 6 is no longer supported).

You are probably not on version 8. You can download the 8.5 beta2 for free and it is a very nice client. Written on the Eclipse RCP framework. So you can write plugins for it.

Can download here.
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/nd85forum.nsf/Customer/2af77f70817fab8d852574b40061d30f?OpenDocument

I also recommend checking out Lotus greenhouse.
https://greenhouse.lotus.com/home/login.jsp

> Lotus sucks

As mentioned you are probaly talking about notes. Lotus covers a wide range of products like connections, quickr, Sametime, Symphony.

I also suspect you are talking about an older version of notes. Currently out in the wild you have version 6 to 8 (pre 6 is no longer supported).

You are probably not on version 8. You can download the 8.5 beta2 for free and it is a very nice client. Written on the Eclipse RCP framework. So you can write plugins for it.

Can download here.
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/nd85forum.nsf/Customer/2af77f70817fab8d852574b40061d30f?OpenDocument

I also recommend checking out Lotus greenhouse.
https://greenhouse.lotus.com/home/login.jsp

Or, if they don't like OSS, they could at least get lower-cost solutions like Sun's StarOffice (USD35 per person, allowing up to five installs for that person's use at the organization or elsewhere) or IBM's Symphony. Those are some pretty big names.

Oh, and...

If IBM puts on Lotus Smartsuite for Linux or Lotus Notes for Linux, then people would have a reason for buying an IBM Windows free machine.

There's already a Lotus Notes for Linux. There has been for over a year now. You might want to try the beta of 8.5 too.

SmartSuite isn't going to be ported to Linux because it has too much legacy win32-specific and proprietary-licensed code in it. Plus, nobody but a tiny number of diehards cares about SmartSuite anyway. So why try and retrofit ODF support to SmartSuite, when you can build a suite that was designed for ODF from the ground up?

[Opinions mine, not IBM's.]

Check IBM's web site:

Lotus Symphony
Be Free. Work Smart.

Office productivity software that is intuitive, easy to use and provided at no charge.

http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.jspa

Try Lotus SmartSuite... Get hold of a $7.00 to $30.00 unopened, resold CD. Unfortunately, 1-2-3 has some mouse issues in scrolling in Win4Lin and in VirtualBox (maybe even in windoze), but the STARS of SmartSuite have to be Word Pro and Approach, the WYSIWYG, end-user, no-programming skills-required front end.

I'm creating a screenplay/dialog management tool in it, and the regrettable thing is there is no stand-alone executable, and no way to simply run the finished files by end-users unless they have the full suite disk and then deselect installation of the other components.

Table linking is simplistic, but works. Similar to how FileMaker used to be.

Unfortunately, Approach has not got horizontal sliders for detail tables, but it has filters, constraints, and sliders. There is a large, vibrant end-users group at IBM and elsewhere:

http://jabrown.customer.netspace.net.au/approach/official.htm

http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/ssforum.nsf/0/d361cd261211b1e485256e24004dcd75?OpenDocument&Click=

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Approach

BTW, the form shown on the Wikipedia site does an injustice to the things the forms CAN do. It would be nice if /. could resurrect image/file-posting (safely...)... I could submit some screen shots or actual working tables. But, you can also just go into the "Extras" and the SmartMasters (templates) folders and check out the checkbook, movie rental, and other tables.

See:

http://www.bluechillies.com/details/9317.html

See Built For Employees 1.0

SmartSuite has some 20+ application templates, numerous forms files... THAT is what BASE should have been emulating, but unfortunately, NIH syndrome STILL pervades, even after my circa-2001 pleas for them to peruse Lotus Approach. All we end up with is a hodgepodge of tepidly invented and release, hi-geekoid, no-beauty apps the make me feel my stomach was kicked in.

That's ANOTHER topic, but Open Source needs companies like IBM, Google, & Sun to shell out beautification money so Open Source developers can have their warez evaluated and transformed into wares. I dare say that most would-be converts are put off by sheer UGLINESS of many Open Source apps that never got any real polish for non-developers. Yeh, I know TheKompany has an app (Rekall), and they have some former Approach users, but their interface approach left me feeling I'd had a combination of Approach and Abscess melded. I would have stuck with Omnis's (since become Raining Data) stuff, but I hate the overhead, the licensing schemes, and the need to CODE to get done what I want to get done.

What somebody NEEDS to do is:

Take SQLite or MySQL as back ends and Lotus Approach's FRONT END for it's WYSIWYG interface, and update it to the CAPABILITIES but not the COMPLEXITY of FileMaker, and THEN, THEN, THEN Open Source will have a worthy database application for end-users who want to open all the current database files Approach can access, and have the ease-of-use of Approach...

(steps down from soap box)

At least give us a http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/buzzentry!default.jspa?threadID=4872link

Most people in the Americas, Europe, Australia, Middle East and Africa have no use for Asian characters, so this bug doesn't affect us.

Fair enough. But if OOo really wants to eat MSO's lunch, it needs to cover at least the same bases. And don't forget, the number of people worldwide using these Asian languages comes to somewhere around 20% of the global population. That's a rather large chunk of the potential userbase to ignore. OOo already seems to have some sort of language detection built in; extending the counting functionality to break down Western vs Asian counts similarly to MS Word would theoretically be relatively trivial -- count up the double-byte chars in the document and exclude spaces. Issue 17964 itself has been on the books for almost five years now, and the CJK-specific comments have been part of the public record for over three years. No dev has even deigned to comment on when this relatively simple enhancement might be added, aside from marking the issue with the extremely vague "later" category. Plus, IBM's Lotus Symphony, which is apparently based to a significant extent on OOo code, appropriately breaks down counts to show Western vs Asian stats (and accurately does not include whitespace in the Asian character count). This makes me think the problem is not in the OOo codebase itself, so much as in some other aspect of how the OOo project is put together -- perhaps the poorly organized API docs, internal dev organization, prioritization, or politics, or some other factors.

I can definitely understand the decision to ignore certain areas of functionality when a project is young and still getting its foundation put in place. But OOo itself has been around for almost eight years, and the preceding StarOffice app was begun back in 1994, with the still-older ancestor StarWriter stretching all the way back to well before even the IBM PC. I'd say it's bloody well time OOo moved beyond core functionality. If the core is such a mess that this is still impossible so many years later, that speaks very poorly of the project...

Cheers,

Well, IBM probably have the resources to fix that fairly quickly for the products they need. For starters, they have their own OpenOffice-based productivity suite - not currently available for OS X, but that could change if IBM became Mac fans. Eclipse seems to be pretty stable on OS X these days - and who knows how much of IBMs internal stuff is built on the Eclipse application framework?

...but now that OS X is officially UNIX it ought to follow POSIX rules. Anyway, OS X contains a lot of FOSS subsystems (Apache, Samba, Cups) which ought to be customisable/fixable - and the jolly blue giant probably has the nous to fix things like that.

While your comment was half in jest/spite ..

http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/r5fixlist.nsf

There are two products I use to kill notes and restart it without having to manually kill the tasks. One is called ZapNotes, the other is called KillNotes. Both work great. http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/sandbox.nsf/0/8aa14311cb0c51c388256aa400804e4e http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/sandbox.nsf/0/7b70d2411b8dec9688256acb005c433f

There are two products I use to kill notes and restart it without having to manually kill the tasks. One is called ZapNotes, the other is called KillNotes. Both work great. http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/sandbox.nsf/0/8aa14311cb0c51c388256aa400804e4e http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/sandbox.nsf/0/7b70d2411b8dec9688256acb005c433f

When KOffice 2.0 is released in 2008, it won't be the only competitor to OpenOffice - if you haven't already, check out Lotus Symphony, another open source, ODF-compatible office suite that is expected to come out of Beta in 2008.

Only, it seems, if you can provide a US address. I've just tried to get it, and have been refused because I live in the UK.

Somehow, I think that might be a limit to widespread adoption. Yes, the US market is big, but much of it wants to do business with the rest of the world.

Someone... Just released something for free