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Lotus Symphony 1.1 is a freely available office productivity suite from IBM that brings together a trio of word processor, spreadsheet and presentation applications under a clean and well-implemented user interface.
IBM built Symphony’s UI atop the Eclipse IDE and the company’s own Lotus Expeditor managed client application framework, and turned to the 4-year-old OpenOffice.org 1.1.4 for the core of the suite’s application lineup.
The result is a fairly good productivity suite with an interface that’s much fresher-and a feature set that’s more stale-than those that grace the OpenOffice.org 3.0 release I recently tested.
For instance, upon fir??Ãing up the Symphony word processor application, I was impressed right away by its tabbed interface, which makes switching between different documents-as well as spreadsheets and presentations-as easy as shifting between tabbed pages in Firefox.
However, it wasn’t long before I started noticing the absence of fixes and enhancements that long ago made their way into OpenOf??Ãfice.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.
What’s more, Symphony lacks support for opening documents stored in the new OOXML-based format to which Microsoft’s Office 2007 now defaults.
IBM would do well to sync up its Symphony efforts with the cur??Ãrent OpenOffice.org code base to take advantage of all the progress the project has made over the past four years. One of the great strengths of open-source soft??Ãware is the liberty that separate development groups enjoy to take projects in divergent directions, and IBM’s ideas around UI-as well as the extensibility potential that Eclipse offers-can end up strengthening both projects.
There are a handful of plugins available for Symphony that ben??Ãefit from Eclipse’s module update framework, and I’m looking for??Ãward to seeing where Symphony developers at IBM and elsewhere take the platform.
I suggest that individuals and organizations interested in Microsoft Office alternatives, particularly those with in-house Eclipse development projects in the works, take Symphony for a spin. For now, though, OpenOf??Ãfice.org remains the most viable alternative to Office.
Symphony Up Close
Symphony Up Close
In each of its three compo??ínents, Symphony sports a side??íbar for displaying options such as text or paragraph properties. The sidebar helps thin out the sometimes crowded toolbars you find in OpenOffice.org and places common features closer at hand. What’s more, the Symphony side??íbar boasts a measure of context-sensitivity: When I clicked into a text box on a presentation docu??íment, the sidebar offered text property options; when I clicked outside the text box, the sidebar switched to page properties.
IBM’s spreadsheet application gets the sidebar treatment as well. For instance, I was able to browse through spreadsheet functions using the sidebar.
In many other parts of the inter??íface, Symphony’s graphical elements are identical to those in OpenOffice, such as the Line Numbering dialog box in the Lotus Symphony word processor. However, IBM has situ??íated this and other feature dialogs in a different menu structure. In OpenOffice, this feature lives in Tools–>Line Numbering. In IBM’s new suite, the menu structure is an arguably more intuitive Layout–>Numbering–>Line Numbering.
Beyond cosmetic differences, one of the few unique features of Lotus Symphony that I recog??ínized was the word processor’s Freehand Table option, which enabled me to rough out a table with my mouse. Another feature of Lotus Symphony that OpenOf??ífice 2.3 appears not to offer is a Thumbnail View of your open documents. Also, there’s the tabbed view.
Symphony also sports a built-in Web browser, based on the Mozilla XULRunner project. The embedded browser has fewer features than IE or Firefox, but could prove use??íful 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.
Part of the Eclipse-roots of Sym??íphony shows in its help system, which I found easier to use than the one in OOo. For instance, I fired up the symphony help tool and found, at the top left of the window, a search box into which I could type my query. I searched for the word “concatenate,” and my search turned up three pages from different parts of the doc??íumentation, including the one regarding spreadsheet formulas that I was looking for.
In OpenOffice.org, I had to first choose which application I wished to learn about and then click on the find tab before I could type in my query.
Lotus Symphony 1.1 is avail??íable-for free download-in ver??ísions for Windows, Red Hat Enter??íprise 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’s no OS X version of Symphony at this time-Eclipse is available for the Mac, there’s currently no OS X version of Lotus Expeditor framework on which Symphony is based.
eWEEK Labs Executive Editor Jason Brooks can be reached at [email protected].