IBM To Release Lotus Symphony For Mac, Notes iPhone Compatibility

[weckart]

I'd say it has been killed off; I'd say when push comes to shove, it was easier for them to base a new office suite on OpenOffice + Eclipse SDK than going out and trying to bring SmartSuite to Linux and Mac OS X.D

I would say moribund rather than killed off. Serious development stopped several years ago, but it is still supported on Windows and OS/2 with infrequent update patches being delivered - I assume some corporate customers still have not moved from Smartsuite onto other office packages.

The Windows version is still on sale, btw.

 

[JeffTL]

As a (somewhat begrudging) Lotus Notes user at a university, this is big news and may well sell me an iPod Touch. The server I have to use doesn't have IMAP or SMTP/POP turned on, and the Web main won't even work in Safari on a Mac, much less an iPod or iPhone.

 

[thejadedmonkey]

This is sooooo cool!!!!111!!one!!!eveven111!!!!!!!!!!!

Do you guys think that maybe one day, like, with their partnership and all, they might even swtch processors to the superior power PC architecture?????? Like OMG!!11!!!1!!11!evenentyfirst!!11!!!!!one!!!!
I hear the G5 is a BEAST!!!!!!!!!



Ok, so this is a good thing. Don't look at it as IBM and Apple partnering, look at it more like IBM sees the benefit of supporting Mac... or in other words, we've finally reached critical mass!

 

[bugabuga]

*shudder* Lotus office products are usually used only in one case -- when you have to due to company standard. And even the fact it's a re-badged Open Office won't help much It used to be that Lotus interface engineers only had one goal "be different from Microsoft" and I've suffered via those clunky buggy non-intuitive products immersly.
NoooooO! Keep it awaaaaay! Bad office product! Shoo!

 

[mitsu13gman]

Well, we're on Notes 6.5 here at work, and the current web interface works just fine in Safari on the iPhone.

That said I would really enjoy the coolness factor of being able to access my corporate email from the iPhone's mail interface. I have traveled a lot in the past and being able to get email on the fly (and respond to it) would make travel that much easier. Especially since I never take a laptop with me.

 

[kingtj]

IBM needs Apple more than Apple needs IBM....

I totally agree with you. IBM could do a lot by developing a whole line of OS X versions of their products.

The bottom line is, IBM has kissed Microsoft's butt for far too long, and always gotten burned in the end for doing it. They had a really good opportunity to take over the x86 PC market with the OS/2 operating system, but slowly let the whole thing die on the vine -- all because the majority of managers at IBM couldn't see past the "profitability" of offering Windows on their PCs, and releasing Windows-compatible software, instead.

Now where did THAT thinking lead them? Their hugely popular "Thinkpad" line of portables was sold off to Lenovo in China. They've abandoned the desktop PC market. And their "flagship" competitor to Microsoft Office? Well, let's just say you don't see a whole lot of companies standardized on IBM Word-Pro/AMI Pro as their word processor anymore, and it's quickly becoming a good bet that a given company uses MS Outlook and Exchange, vs. Lotus Notes for email/scheduling.

IBM thrives today, only because they changed direction to becoming more of a "solutions provider". There's always more money in the consulting side of things, and custom-configuring things for people who don't want to do it for themselves.

Their software could find a new "niche" if everything was available for Mac OS X though. This would finally legitimize Apple XServes as suitable application servers for business (good for Apple) too.

There is a lot they could do with Apple if they were so inclined. They were also suggesting that R8 for OSX was going to be released during MacWorld, weren't they? Would be nice to be on par with the other platforms again.

And if they were to collaborate a bit further, I'm sure I'm not the only person out there that would be interested in DB2 on OSX as well, long rumored but never really materialized...

There are probably dozens of other products as well if they were to want to help Apple get a leg up in the corporate world. And why wouldn't they?

 

[aristobrat]

Well, we're on Notes 6.5 here at work, and the current web interface works just fine in Safari on the iPhone.

That's good to know. We're on 6.5.5 where I work, and the web interface is unusable in regular Safari and Firefox, so I never tried it on my iPhone.

 

[Stampyhead]

Lotus Notes, baaaaaaaaaaad

Oh, it's not that bad. I use it here at work and although the interface is kind of ugly and I had to enlist the help of our company's Lotus Notes expert just to get it set up, now that it's going it seems like a pretty powerful email and calendar app. I still prefer Apple Mail and iCal personally, but for those who need Notes email on their iPhones this will be a good thing.

 

[bacaramac]

Well, we're on Notes 6.5 here at work, and the current web interface works just fine in Safari on the iPhone.

That said I would really enjoy the coolness factor of being able to access my corporate email from the iPhone's mail interface. I have traveled a lot in the past and being able to get email on the fly (and respond to it) would make travel that much easier. Especially since I never take a laptop with me.

+1 on this note....I use Lotus Notes at work and would love this feature.

 

[jaydub]

It's very mature, but we so affectionately call it "BlowtusGoats" here at work for a reason. I would run away from putting this on an iPhone.

 

[paulbaker]

Me too

I bought iWork 08 and was planning to get rid of Office but the idiotic way iWork handles Office files made me give up on it. Even though it import and exports .doc and .xls files competently, they can only be opened and saved through the Export menu and don't go in Recent Files either. It's usable, but I really don't understand why Apple made it such a pain to use Office files instead of integrating it properly. Yeah, I could use .pages but most people I know don't use iWork so that's not an option.

The first thing I did was uninstall 2004, but I soon found out that Numbers will not even open the complex spreadsheets that we use (built by a vendor relying heavily on macros is why).. so I keep a copy of Excel....

 

[Object-X]

Lotus X

Three Words:

COPY AND PASTE​

W/o this, what is the point for the iPhone app?

Also, it sounds like Apple is trying to cover its ass if/when Microsoft pulls the plug on it Office suite. If the next version of Windows is delayed, e.g. Vista, and OS X is still gaining market share, then I'd bet they do the nuclear option and pull the MacOffice plug.

IBM wants on the iPhone train. IBM sees this as an oppertunity to push thier Lotus software by integrating it nicely with all those iPhone users at the office; which will undoubtably be a very large number. This is a great partnership for Apple, becuase it will help Apple's push into the smart phone market despite not having much presence in the corporate world. It benefits IBM because it gives their office software an advantage over Microsoft's. Now, if IBM would only write a version of Lotus for OS X.

 

[agentkow]

That's good to know. We're on 6.5.5 where I work, and the web interface is unusable in regular Safari and Firefox, so I never tried it on my iPhone.

I'm on one of the few employee Macs in this University, and while we all have Lotus Notes 7.0.3, the web interface doesn't render properly or work very well in Safari but it manages to actually send email, while on the flip side, the interface is great and really handy in Firefox but it never actually sends mail.

They've even got IMAP turned on and I've managed to get mail in Apple Mail.app, but for the life of me I can't figure out how to send mail...

 

[twoodcc]

awesome news. it's good to partner with IBM again, methinks. looking forward to more iPhone apps!

 

[kironin]

Hard to get excited about this when I have so many free choice alternatives already. If I am really just writing I use WriteRoom. Then for blogging, multimedia note taking and misc stuff nothing beats Journler. Then for word processing there is Bean (www.bean-osx.com) or the more mature AbiWord. For heavy duty, there is NeoOffice. I haven't found any compelling reasons to upgrade to iWork'08 and certainly don't see a reason to ugrade MS Office X 2004 to 2008 given the rarity with which I use it. Ticks me off that I am paying for things I will never use like Entourage.

I think Bean and Jounler would be great on a 2nd generation iPhone.

 

[mitsu13gman]

That's good to know. We're on 6.5.5 where I work, and the web interface is unusable in regular Safari and Firefox, so I never tried it on my iPhone.

I just double-checked, and we're on 6.5.3, September 14, 2004.

I will warn you that it requires a significant data overhead to bring up, so only try this on Wi-Fi.

That said, it works fine (at least for checking messages, I don't remember if I tried to send one or not), so I was pretty happy with it.

 

[JD92]

This is great news! I used to use NeoOffice but it was too big and slow so I switched to iWork 08, but it annoys me that it has no support for ODF and so I can't share my .pages files with my Linux PC.

Hopefully with Lotus Symphony there will finally be a good office suite with good compatibility for standards (i.e. not .doc, .docx or .pages).

:-D

 

[csimmons]

Three Words:

COPY AND PASTE​

W/o this, what is the point for the iPhone app?

Also, it sounds like Apple is trying to cover its ass if/when Microsoft pulls the plug on it Office suite. If the next version of Windows is delayed, e.g. Vista, and OS X is still gaining market share, then I'd bet they do the nuclear option and pull the MacOffice plug.

If Apple continues to gain share and MS does decide to do the so-called nuclear option, it would be one of the dumbest moves in corporate history.

It simply makes no business sense for MS to pull Office from the Mac. Cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Kind of like the music labels holding back new releases from iTunes in favor of Amazon as a means to "hurt Apple", when the latest stats show that the Amazon Music Store has actually <b>helped boost sales</b> of the iPod.

 

[MacFly123]

I completely agree. I think iWork is a fantastic package. I am only starting to use Numbers but Keynote is outstanding and Pages is excellent too.

As far as I am concerned, iWork 08 is one of the best value software packages available on the Mac.

AMEN! I LOVE iWORK \'08 It does everything I would ever need it to do so simply, and it is all beautiful I take pride in not buying a single Microsoft product

 

[starkmjs]

How do you get webmail to work on an iphone?

I'm on one of the few employee Macs in this University, and while we all have Lotus Notes 7.0.3, the web interface doesn't render properly or work very well in Safari but it manages to actually send email, while on the flip side, the interface is great and really handy in Firefox but it never actually sends mail.

They've even got IMAP turned on and I've managed to get mail in Apple Mail.app, but for the life of me I can't figure out how to send mail...

I don't have an iphone yet, but have tried several at the Apple stores, and the webmail we have at work for Lotus Notes will NOT run on Safari at all. It is Firefox only, which really bums me out because as of now there is no way to get my corporate email on an iPhone.
IT will not enable the IMAP function (security issues blah blah blah), so I am really hoping this Lotus Notes for the iphone comes through.

It's the only reason I haven't bought one yet.

 

[ayale99]

Lotus Notes is horrible! I just started a new job about a month ago and am now forced to use this poor excuse for an email program. It looks like the interface hasn't been updated since 1991! I could care less if it came to the iphone. Entourage IMO is the gold standard.

 

[jhande]

We use Notes 7 (testing 8) in the company I work for, and this is major news!

For those of us that are tethered to IBM, this is an excellent shoehorn for Apple into the corporate workplace. Even our CTO has gone fruity. The trickle down effect looks go solidly in place. This announcement will only strengthen this.

One of our sysadmins came over to me today and started asking about my MacBook, integration, and noticed that I haven't had any support tickets ever.

They *will* be assimilated, and the pace will accelerate.

The thing that gets me is that I'm seeing more and more Apple laptops (mainly) in the enterprise. Almost without fail, it's because a top or middle manager decided to take the jump, and the rest follow.

 

[yellow]

Very cool. Very very cool.

My quasi-corporate environment currently says no to iPhones because they cannot be used with our Domino Servers (they're not turning on IMAP/POP).

But this would be a huge chink in their no-iphone-armor.

My chances of getting a free iPhone just went up 75%!

On another note, I'm curious if this is just a front end for iNotes via Safari, or a stand alone client that connects directly to the Domino servers.

 

[GNUMatrix]

Lotus Notes as a product

Lotus Notes is horrible! I just started a new job about a month ago and am now forced to use this poor excuse for an email program. It looks like the interface hasn't been updated since 1991! I could care less if it came to the iphone. Entourage IMO is the gold standard.

Disclaimer: I've been a Notes/Domino develoepr on and off since around R4 or so.

I'm always amazed at how many people dislike Notes so much. Given the alternative of Outlook (pick your version) and Exchange, Notes/Domino is a far more capable product and has a far richer history and maturity to it than almost any other product out there. Is it a big program? Yes. But if you think about what it does, what it is capable of, and what it brings to even a small organization, even today it is still a "killer product" by most definitions. The problem has always been that it isn't Outlook. And it isn't Exchange. And it isn't IIS/Apache. And it isn't sendmail. And it isn't (product X). It's actually ALL of them in a nice cohesive package if you've got the time and inclination to learn what is there... But I guess that's the catch.

 

[starkmjs]

Dude, I'm sorry...

Disclaimer: I've been a Notes/Domino develoepr on and off since around R4 or so.

I'm always amazed at how many people dislike Notes so much. Given the alternative of Outlook (pick your version) and Exchange, Notes/Domino is a far more capable product and has a far richer history and maturity to it than almost any other product out there. Is it a big program? Yes. But if you think about what it does, what it is capable of, and what it brings to even a small organization, even today it is still a "killer product" by most definitions. The problem has always been that it isn't Outlook. And it isn't Exchange. And it isn't IIS/Apache. And it isn't sendmail. And it isn't (product X). It's actually ALL of them in a nice cohesive package if you've got the time and inclination to learn what is there... But I guess that's the catch.

..but the majority of people I talk to, really dislike this program. I'm sure you've put a lot of time and energy into it, but I have to agree with the other poster. It's slow, and just not very user friendly.

Don't worry, though. I produce television commercials for a living. And the majority of people I know think most ads suck.

Is what it is.

Having said that, I'd love to have it on an iPhone, so I could get my corporate email. Like I said before, as soon as I here this is happening, I'm buying my iPhone.

Well, maybe after the 3G version comes out..