Lotus Symphony 3 beta 2 Linux Overview

Lotus Symphony 3 is a proprietary office suite developed by IBM from the source code of OpenOffice.org 3. The second beta of this package was released on February 26 and I wanted to know what this program is.

Main program window

The main window of the program meets us with beautiful icons and pleasant colors.
The program interface is not translated into Russian in the standard package there are no Russian dictionaries for spell checking. Perhaps in the final version, translation and dictionaries will appear, but still it was worthwhile to foresee the possibility of using system dictionaries.

Clicking on one of the three giant icons opens a new tab with the document.
The most pleasant feature of Lotus Symphony is tabs. When working with office programs it is very convenient to see the list of open documents and to be able to quickly switch between them.

Using the Ctrl + Shift + T combination, a thumbnail window opens in which you can select the desired document or use the search bar.

Another distinctive feature of Lotus Symphony is the side panel. This panel displays the buttons for frequently used functions. Due to the removal of part of the buttons on the side panel, only one row of buttons remained in the standard toolbar, this saved some vertical space (very useful in the age of widescreen monitors). However, the tab bar occupies the space of the second toolbar, so the size of the workspace in Lotus Symphony is almost the same as in OOo.
')

Functionality

I will not dwell on the individual programs of the package, because in addition to the location of menu items, all functions are completely identical to those from OpenOffice. When you open any dialog box, you see the standard OpenOffice window. All dialog boxes use the usual system colors, which contrasts somewhat with the colors in the main window.

The location of menu items resembles something between Word and OpenOffice. The page settings are in the File menu, moreover, the program settings are also located in the File menu, which I personally encounter for the first time in both Windows and Linux. I could not find in the menu the command to insert a formula into the document, although ready-made formulas open without problems.

Other features

Lotus Symphony supports plug-in architecture, taken from Eclipse, in addition there is the ability to connect some widgets. All these bells and whistles have no particular practical use for ordinary users and are intended primarily for specific corporate solutions.

Memory consumption

The system monitor shows the following picture:

The symphony process starts a child OpenOffice process, which seems logical from the point of view of the LGPL licensing restrictions imposed on using OOo in closed programs.
Memory consumption is somewhat larger than OOo through the use of two separate processes.

Browser

Yes. Lotus Symphony has a built-in web browser. Judging by the User Agent, this is the old version of Mozilla or Firefox. I don’t have to expect any special miracles from him, but the concept of browser integration into the office environment seems to me to be quite good. Sometimes it is convenient to keep a tab with wikipedia or another source of creative inspiration next to a text editor.

We tear covers!

There is no way to create a drawing (like in OpenOffice Draw) or a database (OpenOffice Base) through the standard Lotus Symphony window, you might get the impression that the developers threw these functions out of the package. I was lucky to stumble upon an interesting bug that allowed me to look under the wrapper Lotus Symphony.

In the settings, it is possible to optimize memory consumption for computers with a memory capacity of more than 1 GB (similar to QuickStart in OOo). After enabling this option, two (!) Symphony icons appeared in the tray, one of which behaves like a regular OpenOffice icon, and the second launches the main window of Lotus Symphony. Using the first icon, you can create separate windows for editing documents, including formulas, vector drawings, as well as databases.

Summary

The current beta version is unstable, the speed of work on sensations is lower than OOo. The functionality of the program corresponds to OpenOfice.org 3.0.
The office suite Lotus Symphony is intended primarily for corporate users, it has a developed system of plug-ins and widgets, and also integrates well into Lotus Notes. From the point of view of a regular user, Symphony is more like a beautiful skin to OpenOffice.org with tabs and reduced functionality.