Today I was at the Hayden Planetarium for the NYC edition of the Lotus Collaboration Summit. Steve Mills and Mike Rhodin delivered the keynote, covering the announcements IBM made today. Lotus Symphony was the first announcement of the day, IBM has now released the productivity tools that shipped in Notes 8, as a stand-alone free office suite. The Symphony name is being recycled as it was used years ago for another Lotus Office Suite. I suspect this one will do a little better with the price tag being right, and the document format being open so it will work well with other office suites. I suspect the system requirements might also be a little different then original Symphony product.
Like its predecessor, Symphony is loaded once into memory. Then, unless you need to print graphs or use some of the other arcane functions, no further program loading is necessary. The differences is that 1-2-3 requires about 128K of system RAM for program instructions while Symphony uses twice as much. Lotus recommends a minimum of 320K of memory to use Symphony, but a more practical configuration would include 512K. With the minimum RAM you can load the program and use all of teh software features, but the amount of data you can manipulate is reduced.
Symphony was also covered in the Technology section of the New York Times today Next up IBM announced plans to provide hosted Notes 8 environments for small to mid-sized companies, with options to include Sametime and Quickr, and plans to provide hosting for more products down the road. There was a recap of the Sametime Announcements made last month at Voicecon, even better after the keynotes there were demos of some of the Sametime Advanced, and Sametime telephony products in the innovations labs. Domino 8.0.1 was officially announced, as well as some of the new features that will be delivered with 8.0.1:
- Domino Web Access light
- UI Improvements to the To Do’s
- Quickr Sidebar integration
- Mail Quota gauge
- Better compression delivering 35% reduction in storage.
- 64 Bit for Windows and AIX
- Notes Traveler for mobile e-mail, calendar, contacts and to do on Windows Mobile (and yes if you are curious this is why I got a Windows Mobile device, been beta testing this for a few weeks now) For all the Mac users out there there was a demo of Notes 8.0.1 on the Mac as well. Quickr 8.1 was announced, with new features
- Quickr integration with Outlook
- UI Improvements
- Quickr Personal edition
- Integration with Enterprise Content Management Systems (Filenet, Documentum, and more to come) Quickr content integrator – a new product being released to facilitate the migration or synchronization of data from Sharepoint, Exchange, Domino and Domino.doc with Quickr. Finally Lotus Connections was covered, and in the labs they were showing some of the plans for Connections 2.0. The plans for 1.0.2 in November with official support for Domino LDAP was confirmed as well. One of the themes throughout the entire presentation was not only the features and enhancements to the products, but the commitment to seamlessly integrate all the products together, this is an area that IBM needs to focus on, and it is nice to see them talking about it when they are announcing products and features. There was a portion of the program which was a customer panel where customers answered some questions based on their experiences with Lotus products and their plans for the next year. I had been invited to be a member of the panel, but unfortunately did not have enough time to get sign off from my corporate communications department to participate, maybe next time. The Hayden Planetarium was a really great choice for the event, and the weather was great today to be walking around NYC. Symphony press release Collaboration Summit press release Product announcement press release