This just in...

ARMONK, NY, September 10, 2009 --- IBM has begun offering Microsoft customers free of charge productivity software that is compatible with popular Microsoft Office formats, and supports a wide range of widgets popularized by consumer Web sites and third parties that extend the functions of Lotus Symphony.

These widgets allow people to tap into everything from Web-based Google Gadgets, Lotus Sametime, Lotus Quickr, Lotus Connections, popular wikis, even Microsoft Sharepoint and MSN from within Symphony. IBM's Lotus Symphony (link) software provides word processing documents, spreadsheets and presentations effectively replacing Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Powerpoint.

IBM has added a new feature that allows individuals to easily drag-and-drop widgets into Lotus Symphony, distinguishing it from static office productivity tools such as Microsoft Word. Drag-and-drop also makes Symphony stand out from other Microsoft alternatives, simplifying the use and installalation widgets with just one click. With this drag-and-drop feature, IBM and various third parties including independent software vendors, individual developers, customers and Business Partners are writing a wide range of new widgets for Lotus Symphony.

Widgets extend Symphony's capabilities through the commonly accepted open standards, Eclipse and Java. Due to its cross-platform nature, Symphony's widgets are developed once and run across all three Symphony document, presentation and spreadsheet applications, lowering the cost to bring new capabilities to end users; whereas new applications must be built separately for Microsoft Word, Microsoft Office and Microsoft PowerPoint.

IBM Lotus Symphony leads a growing class of Microsoft Office alternatives, with millions of copies in circulation. The first full version of Symphony appeared on June 3, 2008.

"Today there are more innovative, open alternatives such as Symphony that compare favorably to Microsoft Office," said Bob Picciano, general manager, IBM Lotus Software. "Symphony's open collaboration model can offer businesses limitless options cost-effectively at a time when many organizations are increasingly concerned about investing in Microsoft Office."

New Widgets, New Capabilities

Among the more popular widgets supported for Symphony are cloud-based Google Gadgets such as the Currency Converter Gadget which shows equivalent monetary values; the Unit Converter Gadget which translates units of measurement; and the Wikipedia Gadget that provides instant access to information on Wikipedia, and many others all directly from within Symphony.

IBM also announces the debut of new widgets designed to extend Symphony from office productivity to a more interactive collaboration tool, including:

The Lotus Symphony Learning Widget blends local and cloud-based learning resources at the individual's fingertips inside the product to quickly master the full range of Symphony's capabilities.

• With Team Workspace Widgets, people can access and work with documents from the most popular tools including Microsoft Sharepoint and Lotus Quickr.
• The new ChartShare Widget enables the instant sharing of an individual's screen with from one to 20 people to view a presentation file. To edit and co-create charts, users can launch a Sametime Unyte Live meeting in a single click within Symphony. This widget demonstrates how to seamlessly blend rich client and cloud computing. It also provides presence awareness and instant messaging capability in side shelf for anyone that has been a contributor to the presentation.

Symphony 2 Wiki Widgets are two new widgets that plug into Symphony to create rich wiki content inside of Symphony and convert the content for publishing to wikis such as Confluence Wiki and Mediawiki. Treasure Box allows Symphony to keep on hand links to frequently used documents, graphics and applications and insert them directly into your presentation, for example, without exiting Symphony. This widget essentially makes a "favorites" list right within Symphony for several file types inlcuding presentations, documents, as well as graphics and applications.

The Export Graphic Widget lets users export graphics, shapes, and charts they create in Symphony to files in common formats such as .gif, .jpeg, .png, .bmp helping them save time by re-using their visual creative.

Consumers, students, businesses, governments, universities and non-profits around the world have saved many millions of dollars using IBM Lotus Symphony. While Symphony is free of charge to download and use by consumers and organizations, large businesses can opt to buy contracts for help desk support for a flat fee of just over $26,000 per year which still represents a significant savings over a Microsoft Office licensing agreement. Depending upon environment, Lotus Symphony could save a company millions of dollars in software license fees or software renewal fees.

In its most recently released version, Lotus Symphony 1.3, enhancements were added such as support for Microsoft Office 2007 file formats such as .docx, xlsx, and .pptx which allow most Office users to easily access and transfer company information into Symphony or work seamlessly with a Microsoft user. Symphony has DataPilot (also known as pivot table) improvements that allow people to easily drill down and analyze data. Mail merge and envelope printing enhancements appeal to organizations that need cost-effective ways to correspond with customers.

In addition, Lotus Symphony is also packaged with Lotus Notes and Lotus Foundations with support already included, no extra charge. Symphony is available on a wide range of devices and platforms including Apple MacIntosh, Microsoft Windows, Ubuntu Linux, Red Hat Linux and Suse Linux. IBM Lotus Symphony can be downloaded free of charge at: http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.nsf/home

Add some viral UX video to this, and you've got a hit on your hands!

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I think the thing that makes our community (that is, the Lotus Online Community at large) so successful is the fact that we readily adopt new technologies that allow us to connect to and collaborate with people that can make our day-to-day that much easier. This community is filled with subject matter experts, ranging from those who know absolutely everything about a particular niche feature in a given Lotus product family to expertise that resides outside of the Lotus product family. A simple tweet to asking for suggestions for a XHTML, XML, CSS, etc. editor for Windows - yielded many awesome suggestions and a confirmation that Aptana was the product to go with!

So I was interested (to say the least) when I heard the news from Lotusphere 2009 about LotusLive.com, and decided to check it out. I was surprised to find that it's more than yet-another-social network for the online community! Formerly Bluehouse, LotusLive showcases some of the latest Lotus tech in the Business 2.0 product space, giving us hands-on demos of the integrated Communities, Forums, File Sharing, online Meetings (powered - from what I can tell - by Sametime Unyte/Webdialogs), as well as Instant Messaging via Sametime. Now, being both a BleedYellow and Greenhouse user, I'm used to public community-based Sametime - but using this in combination with the Unyte features makes this a killer community solution. But I might be getting ahead of myself here...

The Good

• Lotus Connections + Sametime Unyte
• Hands-on playground, where I can not only learn just-how-useful this particular Lotus technology can be, but something that I can showcase to my customers.
• If you've signed up for Bluehouse, your login credentials have been ported!
• Registration, and usage, is free!

The Bad

• Works great in Internet Explorer and Firefox, but Google Chrome (which I use as my day-to-day browser) and by extension Safari... not so much.
• The Activities Sidebar widget doesn't appear to work with LotusLive.com. Perhaps it's a versioning issue...
• I have near 400 people that I'm connected to on Facebook, 250+ following me on Twitter, and with BleedYellow and Greenhouse... adding new users to my contact list for another social network is becoming tiring.

So, how can we make it easy to get connected? Well, here's a quick tip! Post a URL to your LotusLive Profile!

From My Dashboard, simply click on your name under the My Account. This will bring to you your publically-accessible LotusLive.com Profile. From there, you can either tweet, blog, or otherwise communicate that profile by it's URL. For example, my LotusLive.com Public Profile can be found at https://apps.lotuslive.com/contacts/profiles/view/11739.

Once you've opened, someone's profile - provided you've authenticated to LotusLive.com yourself - simply select the Get Connected option on their profile, and you're all set!

And you Sametime Client users can quickly add the LotusLive.com Sametime Server to your Server Communities list: im.lotuslive.com.

So if you haven't checked out LotusLive, or haven't been back since it was Bluehouse - give it a spin. I have a feeling (</wink>) that this is just the beginning of many cool and useful community initiatives coming from IBM/Lotus, so get in there now and start playing!

Here's a 52 second Jing videocast showing how you can add a Lotus Notes Form as a Sidebar Widget. Once you check that out... you may be interested in what went into the design of said Form Design Element.

I'll use SOTU v0.2 as my example here, so if you haven't already, go download it so you can play along at home...

So first, I created a pretty simple Form Design Element named "sidebar_remotecommand":

Pretty simple stuff. SaveOptions prevents the Form from being saved back to the database, and my Process button looks like this:

Sub Click(Source As Button)

	

	Dim s As New NotesSession

	Dim w As New NotesUIWorkspace

	Dim db As NotesDatabase

	Dim doc As NotesDocument

	Dim uidoc As NotesUIDocument

	Dim vw As NotesView

	Dim scol As NotesDocumentCollection

	Dim sdoc As NotesDocument

	

	Set db = s.CurrentDatabase

	Set uidoc = w.CurrentDocument

	Set doc = uidoc.Document

	Set vw = db.GetView("servers")

	

	Forall server In doc.GetItemValue("servername")

		

		Set scol = vw.GetAllDocumentsByKey(server, True)

		Set sdoc = scol.GetFirstDocument

		

		Call genResponse(sdoc, Cstr(server), doc.GetItemValue("command")(0))

		

	End Forall

	

	Call uidoc.FieldSetText("servername", "")

	Call uidoc.FieldSetText("command", "")

	Call uidoc.Refresh

	

End Sub

... yeah, that's about it. I blank out the fields and refresh the UI so that the "reports" from the processed remote console requests are displayed directly in the widget.

This is an EXTREMELY powerful combination of current subject expertise and this new entry-point into our applications - I'm now running around like a madman creating RAD widgets for all of our applications without the need to ramp-up on Java Sidebar Application development.

Thanks to Tim, I'm trying out Digsby - a multi-service app that is quickly becoming one of my favorites. Not only do I get (almost) all of my "online presence" accounts into a single client, but I get Digsby Widgets. This is an embed-and-play Flash-based IM solution that just works! Simple as that. No tweaks. No fighting with the technology to get it to do what I want. I like that.

So I put said widget on this site within about 2 minutes so that you, Constant Reader, can IM me should you feel so inclined without having to initially add me to your given Contact List. I await the anonymous "you suck, fattie!" with baited breath...

All kidding aside, if the "one [client] to [access] them all" and this widget weren't enough... the UI is UBER slick. Okay, I'll elaborate because I think that this is where the client stands apart from anything that I've seen in the past. Sure, when minimized most clients give UI Prompt notifications of various activity - we've all seen that before. What I think really differs the Digsby client from other clients I've used is, on IMs, you have the ability to immediately respond to said IM as they've included an input element in the Notification! Did I not tell you that this client has a brilliant UI?!

Me too Tim, me too...

I plan on putting this thing through the paces over the next few days. I'm going to try and test out the GTalk VOIP feature within this client sometime today with Tim when we work on getting another episode out to our 3 subscribers, and will report back my findings. From what I've seen so far, I'm ready to uninstall Gtalk/Gizmo/GAIM/....