Symphony
Ah, Symphony. This is a new direction for Lotus (although certainly not a new name), and one that was very well received at the show. In case you aren't aware, Symphony consists of the three productivity editors from Notes 8, pulled out into a separate product, still running under the Expeditor framework, and a completely free download. 400,000 downloads having been made already.

Beta 3 is the current version, in 23 languages. Beta 4 is coming imminently, adding fully exposed APIs for the first time, enabling Symphony apps to be more fully integrated in the composite apps framework that is Lotus Notes. Imagine on-line translation via a plug-in from WebSphere, for example.

Symphony is based on OpenOffice, but sadly not the latest version, and has been made over by IBM to add some extra features as well as embed into Expeditor. The three apps, Documents, Spreadsheets and Presentations are not totally compatible with Word, Excel and PowerPoint, but can read and write the relevant file formats, as well as ODF formats and SmartSuite, and are, in the main, pretty good. I noticed that a large number of the slideshows given at Lotusphere were done with Symphony or the Notes 8 presentation editor.

What's less obvious, until we did a little digging with the help of IBM China's Michael Karasick, Director of Lotus Software Development there, is what Symphony is really for. It's to do two things.

One is to promote IBM's support for ODF (Open Document Format), for which there is a growing demand in Europe, parts of the US and indeed all over the world and which, given its roots, is fully supported by Symphony. IBM's view is that ODF is too important not to take a strong stand supporting it, and see that the format provides opportunities, beyond Office, for changing the paradigm of Office documents into new forms of data storage, with more intelligence in that data.

The other reason for Symphony is to compete head-on with Microsoft. IBM points out that Microsoft derive pretty much all of its profit from Office, so giving Office a serious competitor will affect all of Microsoft's business lines -- most of which are loss-makers, and so potentially change the IT marketplace. IBM acknowledge that Symphony will never do all that Office can do, but says that it's capable of supplying all the needs of 90% of the employees of most enterprises -- and indeed, since I started using within Notes and in beta 3, I've hardly used the Office equivalents.

As an incidental, I also hardly use IE either, these days, finding Firefox a more attractive alternative, as did nearly every Web demo at Lotusphere. [Most of us at ZATZ HQ also use Firefox almost exclusively. -- DG] By providing Symphony as part of Notes, it will mean that Notes users will be able to do all of their work within a single product and a single point of focus, rather than having to leave Notes to work on other documents.

And given that it runs in Eclipse and is based on open standards and open source, IBM's intention is to try to commoditise this part of the market, so leaving Microsoft (and its customers) with an uncompetitive proprietary island that's increasingly expensive to stay on and increasingly attractive to get off. They rubbed this in with a case-study from Brazilian partner Totvs, who have added Symphony to their Notes-based CRM and now offer the complete package on Linux, so requiring no Microsoft licenses at all.