IBM Lotus Symphony is a discontinued suite of applications for creating, editing, and sharing text, spreadsheet, presentations, and other documents and

browsing Browsing is a kind of orienting strategy. It is supposed to identify something of relevance for the browsing organism. When used about human beings it is a metaphor taken from the animal kingdom. It is used, for example, about people browsing o ...

the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web ...

. It was first distributed as commercial

proprietary software Proprietary software is software that is deemed within the free and open-source software to be non-free because its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner exercises a legal monopoly afforded by modern copyright and i ...

, then as

freeware Freeware is software, most often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for the ...

, before IBM contributed the suite to the

Apache Software Foundation The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is an American nonprofit corporation (classified as a 501(c)(3) organization in the United States) to support a number of open source software projects. The ASF was formed from a group of developers of the ...

in 2014 for inclusion in the

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

Apache OpenOffice Apache OpenOffice (AOO) is an open-source office productivity software suite. It is one of the successor projects of OpenOffice.org and the designated successor of IBM Lotus Symphony. It is a close cousin of LibreOffice, Collabora Online and ...

software suite. First released in 2007, the suite has a name similar to the 1980s

DOS DOS is shorthand for the MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS family of operating systems. DOS may also refer to: Computing * Data over signalling (DoS), multiplexing data onto a signalling channel * Denial-of-service attack (DoS), an attack on a communicat ...

Lotus Symphony suite, but the two software suites are otherwise unrelated. The previous Lotus application suite,

Lotus SmartSuite Lotus may refer to: Plants *Lotus (plant), various botanical taxa commonly known as lotus, particularly: ** ''Lotus'' (genus), a genus of terrestrial plants in the family Fabaceae **Lotus flower, a symbolically important aquatic Asian plant also ...

, is also unrelated. IBM discontinued development of Lotus Symphony in January 2012 with the final release of version 3.0.1, moving future development effort to

, and donating the

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the ...

to the

Features

IBM Lotus Symphony consists of: * IBM Lotus Symphony Documents, a

word processor A word processor (WP) is a device or computer program that provides for input, editing, formatting, and output of text, often with some additional features. Early word processors were stand-alone devices dedicated to the function, but current ...

program * IBM Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets, a

spreadsheet A spreadsheet is a computer application for computation, organization, analysis and storage of data in tabular form. Spreadsheets were developed as computerized analogs of paper accounting worksheets. The program operates on data entered in ...

program * IBM Lotus Symphony Presentations, a

presentation program A computing, a presentation program (also called presentation software) is a software package used to display information in the form of a slide show. It has three major functions: * an editor that allows text to be inserted and formatted * a ...

* A Web browser based on Firefox 3 Each application is split into tabs. Symphony supports the

OpenDocument The Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF), also known as OpenDocument, is an open file format for word processing documents, spreadsheets, presentations and graphics and using ZIP-compressed XML files. It was develope ...

formats as well as the binary

Microsoft Office Microsoft Office, or simply Office, is the former name of a family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. It was first announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at COMDEX in Las Vegas. Initially a marketin ...

formats. It can also export

Portable Document Format Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating syste ...

(PDF) files and import

Office Open XML Office Open XML (also informally known as OOXML) is a ZIP (file format), zipped, XML-based file format developed by Microsoft for representing spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents. Ecma International standardized th ...

files. Previous support for

formats was disabled in Symphony 3. Symphony is based on

Eclipse An eclipse is an astronomical event that occurs when an astronomical object or spacecraft is temporarily obscured, by passing into the shadow of another body or by having another body pass between it and the viewer. This alignment of three c ...

Rich Client Platform The rich client platform (RCP) is a programmer tool that makes it easier to integrate independent software components, where most of the data processing occurs on the client side. Overview RCP is a software consisting of the following components: ...

from IBM Lotus Expeditor (the shell) and

OpenOffice.org OpenOffice.org (OOo), commonly known as OpenOffice, is a discontinued open-source office suite. Active successor projects include LibreOffice (the most actively developed), Apache OpenOffice, Collabora Online (enterprise ready LibreOffice) a ...

3 (the core office-suite code). In 2009, IBM created development tools for

BlackBerry The blackberry is an edible fruit produced by many species in the genus ''Rubus'' in the family Rosaceae, hybrids among these species within the subgenus ''Rubus'', and hybrids between the subgenera ''Rubus'' and ''Idaeobatus''. The taxonomy ...

smartphones to link to IBM's

business Business is the practice of making one's living or making money by producing or buying and selling products (such as goods and services). It is also "any activity or enterprise entered into for profit." Having a business name does not separ ...

software, which also allow opening ODF file-formats, following a full Symphony later. Lotus Symphony 3.0.1 added enhancements including support for one million spreadsheet rows, bubble charts, and a new design for the home page. On 27 March 2012 a first fixpack update for Lotus Symphony 3.0.1 was released. On 29 November 2012 a second fixpack update for Lotus Symphony 3.0.1 was released.Symphony 3.0.1 FIXPACK 2 is Now AVAILABLE
A

web based A web application (or web app) is application software that is accessed using a web browser. Web applications are delivered on the World Wide Web to users with an active network connection. History In earlier computing models like client-serve ...

version of Symphony, called ''LotusLive Symphony'', was launched in 2011.

History

Symphony has its roots in the IBM Workplace Managed Client component of IBM Workplace. In 2006, IBM introduced Workplace Managed Client version 2.6, which included "productivity tools" — a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation program — that supported ODF. Workplace used code from OpenOffice.org version 1.1.4, the last version released under the

Sun Industry Standards Source License The Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL) is now a retired free and open source license, recognized as such by the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative (OSI). Under SISSL, developers could modify and distribute source c ...

, which allowed for release of binaries of modified versions without releasing changes. Later in 2006, IBM announced that Lotus Notes 8, which already incorporated Workplace technology, would also include the same productivity tools as the Workplace Managed Client. In 2007, IBM released Notes 8, and then released Notes' productivity tools as a standalone application, Symphony, in a beta one month later. The code in Symphony is the same as that for Notes 8's productivity tools. IBM released version 1.0 of Lotus Symphony in May 2008 as a free download, and introduced three minor upgrades through 2008 and 2009. In 2010, IBM released version 3.0. Symphony 3.0 was based on OpenOffice.org 3.0, though not under the LGPL but under a special arrangement between IBM and Sun (who required copyright assignment of all outside OpenOffice.org contributions). and includes enhancements such as new sidebars in its user interface and support for

Visual Basic for Applications Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is an implementation of Microsoft's event-driven programming language Visual Basic 6.0 built into most desktop Microsoft Office applications. Although based on pre-.NET Visual Basic, which is no longer support ...

macros, OpenDocument Format 1.2, and OLE. Symphony 3.0 was originally planned to include other existing OpenOffice.org modules, including an equation editor, database software, and a drawing program. The software was developed by IBM China Development Laboratory, located in

Beijing } Beijing ( ; ; ), Chinese postal romanization, alternatively romanized as Peking ( ), is the Capital city, capital of the China, People's Republic of China. It is the center of power and development of the country. Beijing is the world's Li ...

, which now develops

. On 13 July 2011, IBM announced that it would donate Lotus Symphony to the

Apache Foundation The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is an American nonprofit corporation (classified as a 501(c)(3) organization in the United States) to support a number of open source software projects. The ASF was formed from a group of developers of the Ap ...

.. On 23 January 2012, IBM announced version 3.0.1 would be the last version of Lotus Symphony and their efforts would be going into the Apache OpenOffice project, including the Symphony user interface. IBM planned to release an "Apache OpenOffice IBM Edition" after the release of Apache OpenOffice 4, but later decided that it would offer the stock Apache OpenOffice with IBM extensions. There were complaints that IBM and the

didn't really provide an open source release of the Lotus Symphony code, although IBM promised to donate the code to Apache. It was reported that some

LibreOffice LibreOffice () is a free and open-source office productivity software suite, a project of The Document Foundation (TDF). It was forked in 2010 from OpenOffice.org, an open-sourced version of the earlier StarOffice. The LibreOffice suite co ...

developers wanted to adopt some code parts and bug fixes which IBM already fixed in their OpenOffice fork.

Usage share

During the

Lotusphere Lotusphere was an American annual conference hosted by Lotus Software (which later became an IBM software brand) from 1993 to 2017. In 2013, Lotusphere was re-branded as IBM Connect. Except for the first conference, which took place in December 19 ...

event in 2009, IBM confirmed its cost-reduction effort using Lotus Symphony, with the company migrating its 400,000 users from Microsoft Office to Lotus Symphony. In June 2008 IBM urged its 20,000 'strong-techies' employees to use Symphony instead of

and later in September 2009 IBM forced all 360,000 employees to use Symphony. In March 2009, a study showed that Lotus Symphony had a 2%

market share Market share is the percentage of the total revenue or sales in a market that a company's business makes up. For example, if there are 50,000 units sold per year in a given industry, a company whose sales were 5,000 of those units would have a ...

in the corporate market. , IBM stated that Lotus Symphony had 12 million users with 50 million downloads in January 2011.

Version release dates

;Beta 1 :*Released on 18 September 2007 ;Beta 2 :*Released on 5 November 2007 ;Beta 3 :*Released on 17 December 2007 :*Released in 23 languages on 7 January 2008 ;Beta 4 :*Released on 1 February 2008. Introduced the Lotus Symphony Developer Toolkit. :*Revised edition released on 3 March 2008 ;Version 1.0 :*Released on 30 May 2008 ;Version 1.1 :*Released on 29 August 2008 ;Version 1.2 :*Released on 4 November 2008 :*Revised edition released on 23 February 2009 ;Version 1.3 :*Released on 10 June 2009 :*Revised edition released on 1 September 2009 ;Version 3 Beta :*Released on 4 February 2010 ;Version 3 Beta 2 :*Released on 4 February 2010 :*Features: Visual Basic macros, OLE Objects and embedded audio/video; support for nested tables, presentation masters and DataPilot tables for pivoting on large datasets. ;Version 3 Beta 3 :*Released on 7 June 2010 ;Version 3 Beta 4 :*Released on 26 August 2010 ;Version 3.0 :*Released 21 October 2010 ;Version 3.0 FixPack 1 :*Released 13 January 2011 ;Version 3.0 FixPack 2 :*Released 20 April 2011 ;Version 3.0 FixPack 3 :*Released 20 July 2011 ;Version 3.0.1 :*Released 23 January 2012IBM Lotus Symphony 3.0.1 is now available

, 23 January 2012 ;Version 3.0.1 FixPack 1 :*Released 27 March 2012 ;Version 3.0.1 FixPack 2 :*Released 29 November 2012IBM Lotus Symphony - Buzz: Symphony 3.0.1 FIXPACK 2 is Now AVAILABLE

References

External links