eWEEK Labs Walk-Through: Lotus Symphony 1.1

Upon firing up the Lotus Symphony 1.1 word processor application, I was impressed right away by its tabbed interface, which makes switching between different documents-

However, it wasn’t long before I started noticing the absence of fixes and enhancements that long ago made their way into OpenOffice.org. For one, I missed the control-shift-v shortcut that pulls up the “Paste special” menu I’m accustomed to using to paste text from my clipboard while stripping out formatting. Symphony is based on an OpenOffice.org version that lacks that keyboard shortcut.

Symphony lacks support for opening documents stored in the OOXML-based format to which Microsoft Office 2007 now defaults.

In each of its three components, Symphony sports a sidebar for displaying options such as text or paragraph properties. The sidebar helps thin out the sometimes crowded tool bars you find in OpenOffice.org, and places common features closer at hand.

The Symphony sidebar boasts a measure of context sensitivity: When I clicked on a text box in a presentation document, the sidebar offered text property options; when I clicked outside the text box, the sidebar switched to page properties.

Symphony also sports a built-in Web browser, based on the Mozilla XULRunner project. The embedded browser has fewer features than Internet Explorer or Firefox, but could prove useful for switching back and forth between an active document and a handful of source Web pages, since the pages appear in tabs alongside open documents in Symphony.

The Eclipse roots of Symphony show in its help system, which I found easier to use than the one in OpenOffice.org.

Lotus Symphony 1.1 is available as a free download in versions designed for Windows, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. There’s also a beta version of Symphony 1.1 available for Ubuntu Linux 8.04. I tested Symphony with Windows XP and with Ubuntu 8.04.

There are a handful of plug-ins available for Symphony that benefit from Eclipse’s module update framework, and I’m looking forward to seeing where Symphony developers at IBM and elsewhere take the platform.