
Report says IBM is switching from Microsoft Office to Lotus Symphony - jacquesm
http://www.h-online.com/open/Report-says-IBM-is-switching-from-Microsoft-Office-to-Lotus-Symphony--/news/114216
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shellerik
"330,000 employees have already switched"? I think they mean 330,000 employees
have already had Symphony installed on their machines. While internal teams
may eventually switch tools to conform with some corporate standard the
external teams will always use whatever is most appropriate for dealing with
their customers. Customers may not care if email comes from Lotus Notes but
they expect documents to be .doc, .xls, .ppt, .mpp, etc.

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mustpax
Not really surprising since I believe IBM already uses Lotus Notes for email.
Office is just the next logical step.

Anecdotally I haven't heard very good things about Lotus Notes though.
(<http://search.twitter.com/search?q=hate+lotus>) So I wish all IBMers the
best of luck with the transition.

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xsmasher
Snarky comments: "Lotus Notes is what the web would look like if it were
design by committee."

Pithy comments: Notes Mail and Calendar consistently fails at the tasks of
notifying you when you have new mail or a scheduled meeting, two essential
tasks for mail and calendar software.

The last time I developed for it the back end pretended to be a database, but
it is not relational and does not allow arbitrary queries. It also claims to
support HTML in email and other documents, but its rendering was bizarre and
arbitrary, and its support for CSS was almost non-existent.

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cturner
A former housemate started a relationship with a cute girl. Of course, when
non-geeks are around conversation must veer wildly away from anything in the
field. But he said that she might be a bit geeky herself.

Conversation turned towards computing when she was over a bit later on, and I
let it go there. Said housemate and I were having an enormous bitch about
Lotus Notes from shared work experience. She wore on a sour expression, and I
thought my instincts had been shown right.

But then it came out that she was a self-taught Domino developer, and had a
web application with tens of thousands of users hosted off it, built on Domino
- something she'd just done as a hobby.

Now what are the odds of that?

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juvenn
Because the slick design (say the artistic name Symphony), I've just tryed it
on my Ubuntu Jaunty. Being honest, it failed to meet my expectations. Besides
it's built on OpenOffice, it works no better than OO, or even worse. Now I
just use OO, letting Symphony sit there quietly.

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adharmad
Time for them to eat their own dog-food?

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jpd
Lotus Symphony is even slower than Lotus Notes on my machine (Lenovo T61) and
neither of them startup in less than 10 seconds. That's a deal breaker right
there. But at least it LOOKS (superficially) better than Lotus Word Pro which
they preinstalled on my machine. I still use that though because Lotus Word
Pro takes about 2 seconds to start up. Way better.

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nradov
This isn't anything new. IBM has been gradually increasing Symphony use for a
couple years now. The whole Symphony suite is included as part of the Lotus
Notes e-mail and groupware client application.

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ibmer123
yeah, and they are already forcing symphony 1.3 onto our computers via auto-
update. the team I'm on still uses office religiously though.

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brown
How heavy handed will they be? Are you concerned that they'll interfere with
your productivity or is this more of a small incremental step?

