IBM Now Offering MS Customers Lotus Symphony Software With Widgets

IBM is now offering Microsoft customers free of charge Lotus Symphony software that is compatible with Microsoft Office formats and supports a wide range of widgets, which extend the functionality of the software. IBM and a variety of third parties – including independent software vendors, individual developers, customers and IBM business partners – are writing a variety of widgets to take advantage of this new feature.

Popularised by consumer websites and third parties, widgets allow Symphony users to tap into everything from Web-based Google Gadgets, Lotus Sametime, Lotus Quickr, Lotus Connections and popular wikis, to Microsoft SharePoint and MSN, all from within Symphony. Users can easily drag-and-drop widgets directly into Lotus Symphony, distinguishing it from static office productivity tools such as Microsoft Word.

Widgets extend Symphony’s capabilities through two commonly-accepted open standards – Eclipse and Java. Due to their cross-platform nature, Symphony widgets are developed once and run across Symphony’s document, presentation and spreadsheet applications. This lowers the cost to bring new capabilities to end users.

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IBM is also debuting new widgets designed to extend Symphony from office productivity to interactive collaboration. They include:

• The Lotus Symphony Learning Widget, which blends local and cloud-based learning resources at an individual’s fingertips to help users quickly master the full range of Symphony capabilities.

• Team Workspace Widgets, which help people access and work with documents from the most popular tools, including Microsoft SharePoint and Lotus Quickr.

• A new ChartShare Widget, which enables instant sharing of an individual’s screen with one to 20 people to view a presentation file. To edit and co-create charts, users can launch a Sametime Unyte Live meeting in a single click from within Symphony. This widget demonstrates how to blend rich client and cloud computing. It also provides presence awareness and instant messaging capability in side shelf for anyone who has been a contributor to a presentation.

• Symphony 2 Wiki Widgets, which are two new widgets that plug into Symphony to create rich Wiki content inside of Symphony and convert the content for publishing to wikis such as Confluence Wiki and Mediawiki.

• Treasure Box, which allows Symphony to keep on hand links to frequently used documents, graphics and applications and insert them directly into a user’s presentation, for example, without exiting Symphony. This widget essentially makes a ‘favourites’ list right within Symphony for several file types, including presentations, documents, graphics and applications.

• The Export Graphic Widget, which enables users to export graphics, shapes, and charts they create in Symphony to files in common formats such as .gif, .jpeg, .png, .bmp, helping them save time by reusing their visual, creative content.

It the most recent version, Lotus Symphony 1.3, enhancements were added such as support for Microsoft Office 2007 file formats. This allows most Office users to easily access and transfer company information into Symphony or work seamlessly with a Microsoft user. Symphony also has DataPilot (also known as pivot table) improvements that allow people to easily drill down and analyse data. In addition, new Mail merge and envelope printing enhancements will appeal to organisations that need cost-effective ways to correspond with customers.