At Lotusphere2012, IBM made a pretty big announcements around Lotus Symphony. Let's cover them in order of significance, starting with smallest first.
IBM Lotus Symphony 3.0.1 ships
Some great new features like the Speakers View and the one million row support make this a great point release. Not sure if there will be an overlay install for the Notes client but working on that.
IBM LotusLive Symphony morphs into IBM Docs
IBM showed off the newly renamed IBM Docs, now in beta on Greenhouse. If you have used web-based editors like Google Docs and Office 365, this will feel a bit familiar. The integration with IBM Smart Cloud Engage / Connections is impressive. But what really got notice was when they demoed a web editor for creating macros inside the web document editors. The demo was a spreadsheet with a button that inserted data and did formatting. The demo was impressive, but the fact the macro language was javascript was even more so. The timeline for release seems summer for the cloud product with on-premises deployments by the end of the year. Even John C. Dvorak, who rarely writes about IBM, wrote the The Imminent Word Processing Bloodbath covering Google Docs vs. Microsoft 365 and IBM Docs. He missed a bit of the timeline and did not mention Lotus Symphony at well, but I think he captured the coming web editor battle pretty well.
Lotus Symphony Viewers for both iOS and Android are now available
Both of these have been avialable since December, but they got a lot of attention at the show. I was pleasantly suprized that after I downloaded the Symphony viewers to my iPad, I was able to download and open my Speedgeeking presentation and use that for the 12 5 minute pitches on OpenNTF.org. Impressive.
IBM announces full support for Apache OpenOffice.org ... and the end of Lotus Symphony as we know it
The big news at Lotusphere was that IBM is going to stop developing a stand-alone product known as Lotus Symphony and shift all of the developers to Apache OpenOffice.org. They are working on Apache OpenOffice.org 3.4 and bringing over as much of the Lotus Symphony changes and development back into the core OpenOffice.org code. But the real focus is on Apache OpenOffice.org 4.0, which will get the user interface enhancements that IBM made in the Symphony product. Here is a sample image of what Apache OpenOffice.org might look like:
As you can see, I highlighted the Symphony sidebar and panel selection vertical stripe that has been added to the traditional OpenOffice.org user interface. I am sure this will change quite a bit before the release later this year (or next) but its a hint at what is to come.
What does this mean for Lotus Symphony? We just got 3.0.1 and I believe except for fix packs for bugs and any security issues that come out, we have seen the last version of Symphony. IBM Lotus Notes 8.5.X will still have an embedded version of Lotus Symphony, but no one at IBM would commit to a future version of the product having a bundled productivity editor. The main reason is that Lotus Symphony was built on top of Eclipse.org and Lotus Expeditor, and that framework is not moving forward with Apache OpenOffice.org.
I asked IBM about the future and one of the things they expect is to have an Apache OpenOffice.org IBM Edition in the Apache OpenOffice.org 4.0 timeframe. The IBM edition will include the base product and plug-ins that provide integration to IBM Connections and IBM SmartCloud. It will also be supported by IBM in some fashion, like Lotus Symphony is supported for Notes customers today. The details are not worked out, but IBM's intention is to include the entire Apache OpenOffice.org product in this package and only add to the product via plug-ins.
So what is the impact of this change? A few thoughts ...
1. IBM is going to save a bunch of money by not having to import bug fixes and changes from open source project. They are going to work directly on the code branch. They will have less control of what makes a release, as the community selects features as they are checked in. 2. IBM has hired five of the original StarOffice employees who were at Sun and then were Oracle employees. Having some of the original blood as part of the IBM team is a great thing. 3. The Lotus Symphony embedded edition is pretty much dead man walking. It won't go away until we get a new version of Notes (something like a Notes 9 which no one has announced), but if you are building Eclipse plug-ins that integrate with Notes and Symphony, stop. They aren't the way forward. 4. We finally got developer nirvana with the Lotus Symphony LotusScript APIs .. but those don't work with the stand-alone version. It would be great if IBM allowed us to use preferences to point to the external version of Symphony for use with the APIs. That would be a great 8.5.4 feature to bridge the upcoming gap. 5. I think this puts Symphony development and integration on a year long hiatus. Why would you invest in something that might not work next year? I realize that is not a huge community and body of work, but it was a great tool.
Open Questions:
1. What is the plan for the Lotus Symphony LotusScript and Java API that we use with the embedded version of Lotus Symphony? Apache OpenOffice.org does not have a very user friendly API today. It uses the UNO (Universal Network Objects) API. I have demoed code that allows Notes to talk to UNO via LotusScript, and it is damn ugly. Apache OpenOffice.org does not have a COM API today and does not register itself as an OLE object. Will IBM work to make the API's work going forward? Enable COM and OLE within Apache OpenOffice.org itself? Let's hope so. 2. IBM Docs is getting a new javascript macro language. Will that work in a future version of Apache OpenOffice.org? What happens when I open that document that I export in Microsoft Office using their ODF document filters? Coexistence needs to be figured out and demonstrated. 3. Will IBM Docs become an document automation server or is it just a consumer tool? Can I use IBM Docs with a web service and do truely headless cloud based document generation? That is where I want to see this go.
Final Thoughts
Overall I am excited and supportive of this direction. IBM Docs is an exciting product and having IBM put full support behind Apache OpenOffice.org is good for the community in the long term. There are a lot of open questions. A developers roadmap that includes this new IBM Docs javascript API and the existing IBM Symphony Java and LotusScript APIs and the very flexible yet ugly UNO APIs. I hope IBM shows leadership and does some dramatic work here. I will show my support of IBM in a couple ways in the coming week. Look for more.
Games of my youth and crowdsourced funding via Kickstarter
Wed, Mar 14th 2012 6:50p John D Head It is of no surprise to frequent readers of my blog that I am a proud gamer. You can still find me playing a game from time to time to relax. Be it Starcraft2, stupid games on Facebook, an old school copy of Bard's Tale on my ipad, or Gears of War 3 on my XBox 360 with my brother. Games are something I love. Why, because I am part of the generation that remembers and experienced the golden age of gaming first hand. I remember playing Bard's Tale on my Apple 2e. Opening Wasteland to find the ma [read] Keywords: apple
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Honored to achieved my first major sales milestone - PSC 2011 Big Hitter Award
Mon, Feb 13th 2012 8:21a John D Head As much as I have tried to hide it and deny it, the past two years has professionally about my journey from technology consultant to business development. It has not been the smoothest transition. Heck, I even fought it for a year mentally. But last year was the turning point. I hit my stride, accepted my new role, and was able to turn connections into relationships. Last evening, as a great PSC Group event to celebrate and kick-off 2012, I was awarded with a very humbling award. The above photo [read] Keywords: connections
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PSC welcomes our newest collaboration team member - Kathy Brown
Fri, Feb 10th 2012 10:00a John D Head PSC Group is very excited to announce that our team has grown by one, Our collaboration team is expanding and we needed a Boston area resource for some killer XPages, Notes, and mobile development. It's a pleasure to announce that we are lucky that Kathy Brown has agreed to join us to fill that role. For those in the Lotus community, she needs no introduction. For those not, Kathy is an active member of the community, frequent speaker at Lotusphere and other Lotus User Groups, Blackberry develo [read] Keywords: collaboration
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PSC Group Releases Project Risk Profiler Windows Phone Application
Mon, Feb 6th 2012 3:50p John D Head I have previous mentioned the Project Risk Profiler application that we built for iPhone last year. We use the application as part of our Information Command and Control seminars and as a demonstration tool. One of our Microsoft practice developers, Tim Murphy, built a version of the Project Risk Profiler for Windows Phone. You can find in the Windows Phone Marketplace. Awesome work Tim! [read] Keywords: apple
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