IBM To Release Lotus Symphony For Mac, Notes iPhone Compatibility

[GNUMatrix]

Don't worry, though. I produce television commercials for a living. And the majority of people I know think most ads suck.

Fair enough! I'm also very much looking forward to seeing what this actually looks like. I live in Canada, however, so unless it also coincides with Rogers finally getting a clue (unlikely) I still won't be getting an iPhone. Hopefully it will also work on the Touch.

The interesting thing is that if there really are 140 million Notes users out there, that could bring a pretty hefty boost to the 4 million iPhone sales so far. Maybe the 2008 target of 10 million is REALLY conservative???

 

[skeen]

So I don't understand, are they releasing a native app...?

 

[gauchogolfer]

Maybe this will help my company come to grips with people using iPhones for work email. It would be nice if they could get calendar updates going remotely also, since it's a bit of a pain to enter new appointments manually on my iPhone. Email I can at least access via webmail (though not easily, since we have RSA keys).

We're using Notes 7.0.2 btw.

 

[aristobrat]

The problem has always been that it isn't Outlook. And it isn't Exchange. And it isn't IIS/Apache. And it isn't sendmail. And it isn't (product X).

Actually, for me (and most of the folks I work with), the problem is that the user interface is utter rubbish.

 

[agentkow]

..but the majority of people I talk to, really dislike this program. I'm sure you've put a lot of time and energy into it, but I have to agree with the other poster. It's slow, and just not very user friendly.

I concur. Case in point:

- To put a clickable link in most email programs = paste the link.

- To put a clickable link in a Lotus Notes email = paste the link, go up to "Create" in the menu bar, choose "Hotspot" from the menu, then select "Link Hotspot" from the flyout, then click in the "Value" box in the window that appears and paste your link again, then close the window.

 

[GregA]

the majority of people I talk to, really dislike this program.

Back in 1995 I was doing some basic support and rollout of Notes v4, and the general attitude I read everywhere was:
"Notes does badly what no other program can do at all"

It sounds like it's still in a similar place.
It was great for doing certain simple database things, really amazing, but as an email/calendar program it was overkill & just didn't fit the paradigm correctly.

The pity is that cc:Mail used to win awards for its interface, & that brilliant little calendaring program (whatever it was called). It's just they couldn't pull their simplicity into Notes... but I haven't looked since v4.

 

[kaiwai]

I would say moribund rather than killed off. Serious development stopped several years ago, but it is still supported on Windows and OS/2 with infrequent update patches being delivered - I assume some corporate customers still have not moved from Smartsuite onto other office packages.

The Windows version is still on sale, btw.

I'd say that IBM will continue to sell Smartsuite till it is no longer viable - and Symphony/Notes 8 has feature parity with SmartSuite. You would be surprised that there are sill companies out there using lotus smart suite.

 

[SheriffParker]

I wonder when Apple will name their OS that they run on the iPhone.

Its kind of long winded to say "Program X will be available for iPhone/iPod Touch" as if naming the hardware is the only thing they can come up with. If it is a slender version of OS X, they should give it a name.

 

[thunng8]

Back in 1995 I was doing some basic support and rollout of Notes v4, and the general attitude I read everywhere was:
"Notes does badly what no other program can do at all"

It sounds like it's still in a similar place.
It was great for doing certain simple database things, really amazing, but as an email/calendar program it was overkill & just didn't fit the paradigm correctly.

The pity is that cc:Mail used to win awards for its interface, & that brilliant little calendaring program (whatever it was called). It's just they couldn't pull their simplicity into Notes... but I haven't looked since v4.

Version 7's interface is still quite clunky and does thing quite a bit differently to other applications. Version 8 supposedly fixes most of that .. but I haven't tried it myself.

 

[rjohnstone]

Notes... yuck. Hate it.
I've been forced to use that horrible app every day at work for the last 8 years.
It's slow, bloated and not very user friendly.
It eats server storage like it's candy.
The Domino DB structure is a joke.

 

[jasonbuzz]

Disclaimer: I've been a Notes/Domino develoepr on and off since around R4 or so.

I'm always amazed at how many people dislike Notes so much. Given the alternative of Outlook (pick your version) and Exchange, Notes/Domino is a far more capable product and has a far richer history and maturity to it than almost any other product out there. Is it a big program? Yes. But if you think about what it does, what it is capable of, and what it brings to even a small organization, even today it is still a "killer product" by most definitions. The problem has always been that it isn't Outlook. And it isn't Exchange. And it isn't IIS/Apache. And it isn't sendmail. And it isn't (product X). It's actually ALL of them in a nice cohesive package if you've got the time and inclination to learn what is there... But I guess that's the catch.

Lotus developers always tout the capability of Notes and how much more powerful it is than everything else. I think we all get it, but at the end of the day, Lotus Notes is an ugly, ugly beast. It's clunky, unintuitive, the undo button is useless, and it's hard to do simple things like "copy and paste". And that is just scratching the surface....It isn't near as intuitive as Microsoft products which of course lag way behind Apple products.

My company also uses Notes and I've subsidized the iPhone for them. However, I can get corporate mail on the iPhone using some workarounds (autoforwarding copies of all messages to a yahoo plus account which allows me to respond as if I'm responding from my corporate account )

 

[jasonbuzz]

I concur. Case in point:

- To put a clickable link in most email programs = paste the link.

- To put a clickable link in a Lotus Notes email = paste the link, go up to "Create" in the menu bar, choose "Hotspot" from the menu, then select "Link Hotspot" from the flyout, then click in the "Value" box in the window that appears and paste your link again, then close the window.

AMEN!!

Here's another one:

Accidentally delete an e-mail message? Undo won't work. Move the message back to inbox won't work. You have to "restore" the message back to the inbox. Granted it's not that tedious, but completely unintuitive and annoying.

 

[agentkow]

Here's one to show how current the software is:

- In any view, click on the search icon (where you can conveniently only search in the view you are in, not multiple folders or anything too crazy like that) and here are the web search options:

- AltaVista
- Google
- Hotbot

I literally had to got to AltaVista and Hotbot to see if they actually still existed...

 

[yellow]

A while back I ran across an issue in Lotus Notes that just floored me.

On the Mac, there is a SOFTWARE limitation that make it so a Notes archive has a max size of 2GB. It was put in the software back in the days of HFS, when the hard limit of a single file was 2GB. Here it is, 12+ years later.. still the same basic code.

I'm always amused to see the old fashioned wrist watch icon pop up, indicating that there are carbonized portions of the code running.. meaning the code is old as hell.

Of course, the Finder does that too..

But I can't complain too much about Notes. My work will stick with it to the bitter, bitter end.

 

[Robort]

no native app

So I don't understand, are they releasing a native app...?

No, it's just the web interface, according to Ed Brill's blogging of the announcement:

8:50 AM Jeff discusses Traveler and other mobile innovations in Notes/Domino 8.0.1. Mentions DWA "lite" mode and DWA support on the iPhone.

 

[Ratty]

Before anyone gets too excited about this news just remember IBM's past excursions into applications and operating systems etc. (I don't mean the boring corporate high end stuff). As a retired IBM employee with considerable experience with IBM's software products over several decades I would say they do not have the 'balls' to see any worthwhile product through to the end. I have been on their roller coaster ride of Topview for DOS (early windoze competitor), the application suite out of Mountain view labs (hollywood, legato, can't recall the rest) OS/2 what a ride here, (As Bill said "the OS of the 90's), journal file system and mico kernel for OS/2 follow on product (yes there was one!), first integrated Internet kits etc. etc. the list goes on and on and where is it all now. The bean counters at the top loose their nerve when the going gets tough. Symphony will go the way of the rest, the Notes client for the iPhone may be a success but who will be left out there to use it.............

Call me cynical but I have too many memories!

 

[mfacey]

Still no mention of the Symphony suite for mac... Also, nothing to be found on IBM's website. What gives? Office 2008 is scarily unstable (especially Excel). I need something to carry me over until MS sorts it out. Guess I could just use neooffice, but still...

 

[yellow]

I believe it was put on hold because Steve Jobs had a tantrum about the release stealing the thunder of the iPhone SDK?

 

[kaiwai]

Before anyone gets too excited about this news just remember IBM's past excursions into applications and operating systems etc. (I don't mean the boring corporate high end stuff). As a retired IBM employee with considerable experience with IBM's software products over several decades I would say they do not have the 'balls' to see any worthwhile product through to the end. I have been on their roller coaster ride of Topview for DOS (early windoze competitor), the application suite out of Mountain view labs (hollywood, legato, can't recall the rest) OS/2 what a ride here, (As Bill said "the OS of the 90's), journal file system and mico kernel for OS/2 follow on product (yes there was one!), first integrated Internet kits etc. etc. the list goes on and on and where is it all now. The bean counters at the top loose their nerve when the going gets tough. Symphony will go the way of the rest, the Notes client for the iPhone may be a success but who will be left out there to use it.............

Call me cynical but I have too many memories!

I'm a little more optimistic in that I see them finally re-investing after Lou Gestner running the companies R&D and innovation into the ground in the name of 'efficiency'. If you don't know how bad Lou is, read his background on how he ran Nabisco into the ground. Turned it from a number one company, and when he left, it to be bought out by Kraft, the number 2 company when he first took over. People worship as a god, I see him as an over hyped manager who got lucky - and even with IBM, large acquisitions, and never considerations made to the integration into the larger business plans. Just acquisitions for acquisitions sake.

 

[mfacey]

I believe it was put on hold because Steve Jobs had a tantrum about the release stealing the thunder of the iPhone SDK?

What does the iPhone SDK have to do with the release of an open source office suite?

The Notes iphone compatibility thing is a separate issue (and one I don't care about because I don't have an iphone - yet).

 

[MacAodh]

So I'm guessing it's neooffice or openoffice for me then . A well, there both grand anyway.

 

[kepardue]

I really, really like iWork. Pages has made the little bit of writing I do gorgeous and so far has the best floating objects support of any word processor I've used, and Keynote is by far superior to PowerPoint or OpenOffice Presentations. I even like the whole concept of having multiple sheets on a page in Numbers (seriously, why haven't spreadsheet software makers thought of that by now?).

Problem is, I'm a bit of an open standards freak, and I want to know that my documents are by default viewable on OS X, Linux, and Windows and that the format they're saved in is fully documented and will be accessible in 50 years time.

Apple made a good move with OOXML support, but despite what you've heard, OOXML is neither "open" nor "standard". I'd rather work with ODF, and I can migrate the others in our office to ODF and (with the recent very usable Aqua OpenOffice.org release) have almost identical rendering. So I'm kind of limited to OpenOffice/Symphony/what-have-you until Apple releases an iWork that opens and saves ODF files (or heck, I'd even take OOXML, just something that I could share with Windows users) natively--I just don't see that happening, in the same vein as Microsoft, Apple's need to do things their way has led them to create their own format that defies standards and sets us back a decade in the open data portability movement. I'm pretty sure that you couldn't describe the multi-spreadsheet-per-sheet concept in ODF.

I have high hopes for OpenOffice.org 3.0, but I just don't see it having that Mac touch to it.

 

[seymourloo]

Lotus Symphony for mac

Hello... just wondering if anyone knows the status on when Lotus Symphony for Mac will be available?

 

[MacAodh]

I really, really like iWork. Pages has made the little bit of writing I do gorgeous and so far has the best floating objects support of any word processor I've used, and Keynote is by far superior to PowerPoint or OpenOffice Presentations. I even like the whole concept of having multiple sheets on a page in Numbers (seriously, why haven't spreadsheet software makers thought of that by now?).

I love pages as well but it just drives me nuts some of the things in it. For example, if you have it doing capitals at the start of the sentence, you can't take them off if your just saying Eg. you have to manually go back and change it at a later point, rather then pressing command-z like both word and oo.org.

I have high hopes for OpenOffice.org 3.0, but I just don't see it having that Mac touch to it.

Yea, I agree, it's looking great but it's missing that little something...

No word for the mac... there's a product that just drives me nuts. Neooffice any day over that piece of ****

 

[doug in albq]

A full year later and IBM's Lotus Symphony is finally available.

I like it, I did a write-up of it in my most recent blog.