Filed under: Enterprise, Software, Beta Beat
Beta Beat: IBM Lotus Symphony 1.2 now available for Mac
For those of you who don't want to use Microsoft Office on your Macs, there's now another free solution available -- IBM Lotus Symphony 1.2 Mac Beta.Lotus Symphony is nothing new; in fact, back in 1985 there was a version of this suite that ran on the Mac -- I believe it came on seven 800K diskettes -- and was the first all-in-one Mac office application. (Correction -- it was Lotus Jazz; Symphony was the DOS suite. Thanks to Scott F for the memory jog) Back in those days, Lotus was still the powerhouse in office applications and the flagship Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet ruled the roost.
Things have changed. Lotus is now part of IBM and Microsoft Office has owned the office productivity suite world for years. Free office suites such as OpenOffice (which Symphony is based on) and NeoOffice, and cloud applications like Google Docs are quickly making inroads in some organizations. IBM made Lotus Symphony a free product because they see licensing costs for Microsoft Office as a budget-killer for enterprises who could be spending their money on IBM products and services.
Lotus Symphony consists of three modules with self-explanatory names -- Documents, Spreadsheets, and Presentations. The application supports Microsoft Office and ODF file formats for compatibility with other office suites.
Have any TUAW readers tried Lotus Symphony Mac Beta? Leave us your comments.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
petieg said 1:02PM on 11-07-2008
Isn't this based on the old 2.x openoffice code and not the v3.xx code? Why bother w/ oo going full Aqua itself now...
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nicleT said 1:03PM on 11-07-2008
Yes, but for Mac OS X 10.5... Intel!
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NickP said 1:22PM on 11-07-2008
It's pokey and slow, yup seems like old codebase and no Aqua
Plus it could barely deal with a Powerpoint presentation I had.
I'll give it this... if you want a free app suite it's ok, but it's not iWork or Office
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Mike said 1:30PM on 11-07-2008
pretty slow and clunky. price is right though! although among the free options... i'd go elsewhere.
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Mr Lizard said 1:33PM on 11-07-2008
I'll let you know as soon as I'm done clicking through the 500 screens it takes to get to the actual proper download link...
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Phil said 2:19PM on 11-07-2008
You're right !
I canceled the operation ;-(
Adriaan said 3:13PM on 11-07-2008
slow, no support for docx format, no pivot tables, no outlook/entourage replacement (I know this is IBM and to be expected). All in all not a great first mac version at all. Go open or neoOffice.
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Fernando said 2:18PM on 11-07-2008
It's IBM enough said!
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Eduardo said 2:34PM on 11-07-2008
Thanks! Another choice for us Mac users... this is a beta, so it is good idea to provide good feedback to them so they can improve it... user interface is a lot better than openoffice, and different than Neo, code is based on OO 2x but they will updated it to version 3x...
I said the more the better!
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Jeff said 2:49PM on 11-07-2008
I just got it installed on my Mac yesterday, but I've been using it on my Vista machine for quite a while. I actually get along with it fairly well. One significant issue is that it doesn't support the Office 2007 formats. IBM promises that's coming in a future release.
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Bob said 6:47PM on 11-07-2008
Lotus has revised an old name in Symphony. In 1987 Lotus produced the first 'Office' type productivity suite only for the Macintosh. It contained word processing, spreadsheet and flat file database. The three applications were integrated. A portion of a spreadsheet could be imbedded in a word processing document and it would automatically reflect any changes in the spreadsheet. The word processing application was similar to Apple's first word processor 'Macwrite' and the spreadsheet was similar to the first version of Excel, which was also a Macintosh only application. The database program would also merge records with the word processing program.
Symphony ran on a 400k floppy disk and required a 512k 'Fat' Mac. I can still run Symphony on my 1986 'Fat Mac'. I have the application installed on an Apple 20 Meg. external hard drive along with system 4.0. There is no way to get the information out of my old Mac because I can't find ribbons for my old Apple Imagewriter printer. Unfortunately, I can't run the new version on my PPC iMac because the new Symphony is Intel only.
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Scott F said 3:42PM on 11-07-2008
The first all-in-one office application for Mac was Lotus Jazz and I believe it fit on one 800 kB disk, with room for the System folder and a few files. Jazz included a word processor, spreadsheet, simple database, graphing, and terminal emulator.
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Bart-Jan said 7:37AM on 11-10-2008
Well, there was (and still is :-) also RagTime: the first to realy integrate text, layout, spreadsheets, ... in one app.
liam said 5:21PM on 11-07-2008
I am not a tech person but this app almost feels flash based. It is a but laggy (and my macbook's fan kicks in) but it boots quickly.
Nice range of free fonts, minion pro is a nice surprise. I like it at this stage.
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Senecca said 5:26PM on 11-07-2008
You will need to make sure you go into preferences and tweak the performance settings to having more than 1GB of RAM. The suite actually runs better after the fact.
Also I agree that the lack of OOXML format is a shame the benefit here is that they have atleast delivered the Mac community something. I fully expect that it will eventually fall in line with the other releases as well as adding the OO 3.0
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manasclerk said 11:07PM on 11-07-2008
I remember Symphony: what a great ad campaign for a terrific product. For the time. On the PC. Under DOS. I paid for college modeling paint oven emissions in Symphony on an XT. Ah, those were days. Of course, the reason why we loved Symphony was that it provided a Wordstar-like word processor and simple databasing as side dishes to our real interest, spreadsheets. We LOVED 1-2-3. Worshiped, really. 'Twas like a god to us, almost.
Of course, I always liked working on green screens with fixed characters. Kept distractions to nothing.
Good times.
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leftnotracks said 5:36PM on 11-07-2008
Leave it to the makers of Lotus Notes (the suckiest piece of of suck that ever sucked a suck) to make such a painful and complicated download process. If they really don't want us to use the thing, then just don't make it.
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Jamie said 6:00PM on 11-07-2008
Actually, also IBM has made Symphony its official document system internally - globally!
MS Office is being phased out unless there is specific need for it... i guess project and visio being the most common exceptions.
IBM is intending to drop its licence count of MSOffice significantly over the coming years...
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Kenny said 8:51PM on 11-07-2008
Interesting, but when you dig a little bit deeper you find that Lotus Symphony is derived from the OpenOffice 1.x codebase. And for all the boasts on the product's web pages that the use of the Open Document Format prevents you from being locked into proprietary formats, the beta is released under a proprietary license. For all purposes, it is a proprietary fork of the OpenOffice code, and quite old code at that.
Personally, I'm going to stick with the Mac-centric NeoOffice.
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Doug McIntosh said 10:09PM on 11-07-2008
I'm not sure if it qualifies as a "Mac" app, but the first EVER GUI- Based "Integrated Office Suite" (on ANY platform!) was actually Lisa Office 7/7, circa 1983, LONG before Jazz, Microsoft Office, or, well, ANYBODY...
http://www.guidebookgallery.org/pics/extras/spotlights/lisa/derschphotos/04.jpg"
Scroll down to the "Literature" section at the webpage below, for scans of original sales brochures for LisaCalc, LisaWrite, LisaProject, LisaGraph, etc.
http://www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk/Museum/Apple/lisa/index.php
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