Raising Eli & Zachary + a little Princess

Imagine you are the CIO of a company and you just received on your desk a bill from Microsoft totaling $250,000.00 for Microsoft Office licenses. I imagine you cringe, but knowing you really don’t have a choice, you sign the PO request and rub your temples.

A quarter of a million dollars each year is a lot of money to spend when there is a free product out right now that can provide the same functionality. Did I mention the word FREE?. Well that sums up the decision most companies have to face, and the question becomes when can we switch and why haven’t we done it already. Unfortunately, the decision is not that easy.

I have been using Symphony for about two business weeks and I can tell you this. There is only one big hurdle I have: User Training. For the most part, the Symphony is as functional, if not more functional than the Microsoft Office offering. The difference is in what you know how to use, and how easily it is to convert from one suite to another. If I had a training department, and a user base open to change and experimentation I would say it is an easy decision. But we all know the reality of the situation, users are unwilling to change, and would freak at the suggestion that they give up their Microsoft Office technology to go to something new with a learning curve.

In all of my tests, the only package that performed better was Excel, and that was solely based on Symphonies harder to use charting system. In time, I know I will master the charting and the playing field would be even, but the learning curve and level of frustration was way higher than it should have been. Word and Powerpoint are evenly matched in Symphony, with the only real negative aspect of the program being templates and clipart (the clipart is HORRIBLE).

The last bit of concern most users have is the transportability of file formats between Office and Symphony. Let me be absolutely clear: I never had a single problem using an Office 2003 or Office 2007 file in Symphony. I also never had a single problem saving a document, spreadsheet or power point presentation built in Symphony and using it in Office 2003 or 2007. The format fear is complete poppycock.

So I have to give Symphony a thumbs up. I am so convinced it will work for me that I pledge to not uninstall it, or install a Microsoft Office product on my machine to give the product a full year long trial. At that point, every document I produce, every spreadsheet and presentation I create for work will be in Symphony. I can promise you this, nobody will realize that I did the work in Symphony. That in itself, should be reason enough for any leader of an IT department to consider the solution. With a bit of training, Symphony can save your IT department hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing costs. Just think, with all those savings, you can implement the VM infrastructure you always wanted!

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If you have been reading the reviews so far for my experience with Symphony you will understand that I went in with high hopes for the product as a full time replacement for the mighty market share winner Microsoft Office. It didn’t take me very long to trash the spreadsheet portion of the product when it comes to charts and how difficult it can be to customize. Moving into the realm of Word and the Symphony document writer I was poised for disappointment, but I am happy to announce that I actually LOVE it.

Sit back, I think Symphony is better in the Document writer than Word. First, to describe the tests. I pulled about twenty various documents all the way back from 2003-04 to today and opened them without any problem in Symphony. The formatting, the printing, all of it was almost exact duplicates from the output of word, which is huge in my book. What really turned the corner was the ease in editing and IMPROVING the documents in Symphony. Granted, I was not exactly pleased with some of the missing things from the toolbar, but quickly found everything I needed from a simple right click. The interface is wonderful, and compared to the complete screw up interface from Word 2007, Symphony wins out with full honors.

I did so many things so quickly in the document writer. I updated my resume, removing tons of formatting problems associated with word, and added new sections without the format war I am used to. Granted, there are issues, as discussed before templates are missing and need to be downloaded, same with the clipart. But overall, this is a great replacement product when it comes to the ability to leave MS Word behind, especially Word 2007.

Tomorrow: The dreaded Power Point presentation!

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On day 3 of using Symphony I decided to do the same reporting task in excel that I just completed a few days ago for management. Basically it was a comparison of the number of users utilizing our Enterprise Single Sign-On product per application as compared to previous months since deployment.

In Excel, I can get the job done in ten minutes, including the creation of a fancy chart my managers drool over. In this scenario, the data is gathered and the only thing I have to do is create the fancy chart. I will be honest, I anticipated this to be an extremely easy task. A simple 3D vertical bar graph showing May, June and July users per applications.

My first try, I attempted to create a simple, non 3D graph. This worked, although right from the start I had to modify the X Axis character and font and rotate it 90 degrees to be able to fit the application title in. Excel automatically did this for me. I found it strange that the font size was a whopping 16 in Symphony. That font size would never work in any chart I have done except for the title and maybe the legend.

I also wanted to see how customizable this basic chart was. It took a lot of playing around, and even after an hour, I am no closer to figuring out the spacing between my bars. Bringing reinforcements into my cube, a guy I work with who is VERY knowledgeable in Office and excel and we worked hard just to change some basic things such as spacing out the X axis legend from the chart itself, by default, the words are squeezed up to the bottom of the chart which is horrible. Two hours later, we still know less about customizing a basic chart than we should. Score a point for Excel for ease of use.

Moving to a much fancier chart (3D) we were even more confused. The chart drawn out should look decent, and the customization should be easy. It was not. This was extremely disappointing to me because even after a few hours of banging my head on the wall I am no closer to reproducing my excel chart in Symphony with even acceptable responses. I am sure it is just user training that I need, but part of any migration for users to this product should not require days of training. If there was a show stopper for an application on my desk, this might be it. I need to be able to create charts, manipulate them with ease, with little or no help from the outside world. Symphony fails to achieve this.

More next week after the July 4th break on the functionality of the document writer as compared to word.

UPDATE: After a few more hours of playing, I have figured out how to manipulate the graph to look like I want in 2D. 3D has limitations and the amount of data along the X axis determines whether the graph is possible or not, actually more like pleasing to the eye or a jumbled mess. Clearly, the functionality exits in Symphony, it is just a matter of patience and changing the way you operate, which is normal when using a new software system.

As for math formulas, creating complex multi-page spreadsheets I see no difference in ease of use between the offerings. I rather like Symphony over Excel for these functions, and doing a budget was easier via Symphony than Excel.

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In my testing I am going to compare the functionality of Lotus Symphony 1.3 to Microsoft Office 2003 and 2007 because those two products are the biggest competitor to Symphony in the market. In my workspace, Office 2003 is the deployed version of choice with many of us IT guys struggling to cope with the 2007 version (slower, horrible navigation…don’t get me started).

The idea is simple, IMHO a competitor of the Office suite of products should do things Faster, Easier and Better than the market share leader. If you can’t win business because it is better, you should not even try to complete in the same space. Nobody likes to be second, and nobody should spend countless dollars trying to convince others that second is better than first. So this is going to be a tough sell for me, although I am completely in favor of open source products we have to be honest when we say, until now…they just don’t have any real competition.

Installation

Installation was quite simple for Symphony 1.3. I decided, even though I am using Lotus Notes 8.5 that I would wipe my machine clean, do a fresh install of the OS (Windows 7), and Notes (8.5 without Symphony 1.2). The OS is 64bit, Notes is 32bit (because Lotus has not released the admin/dev/notes client in 64bit). I have 4GB of RAM, a fast 160GB Hard Drive and the machine is actually a Dell Optiplex 745.

Upon rebooting the machine after the install (an unnecessary step), I found the icons for each of the suite members and also saw the integration to my notes client was done automatically. I had a fear, that because I did not install the 1.2 version of Symphony with the Notes client install that I would face difficulties later on, but my fears were unjustified.

Look & Feel

To launch Symphony you simply click the icon, but what I was surprised to find was the missing icons in the All Programs directory for each individual program that made up the suite. I don’t necessarily want to click on an intermediate step to get into the document writer. Of course, a few simple clicks and this can be resolved but it would have been more intuitive to add the three icons instead as part of the install process. I think IBM believes that anyone using the product will use it by launching an embedded window within the notes client tabbed window. Either way this is easily fixed.

One of the weaker points of the product is the lack of an easy and direct method of adding clipart or templates. When I first went to create a document, I selected to create a new document based on a template. Guess what, no templates are included. Hmm…how odd. I can install any office suite and be presented with templates galore. After doing a google search I found dozens of templates and was able to download them all with one click, unzip them to a directory and then import the templates. But why should we have to go through that step. Once again, any product competing with the shark of the market share should not require extra steps, it should just be easier.

The same holds true for clipart, I was able to download clipart, but importing the clipart is not as simple as dumping them into a directory. There is actually a technote with instructions on how to do this. There are 9 steps for adding clipart, 9 more steps for adding bullets….wow.

Tomorrow: Using common actions in Word & Excel vs Symphony 1.3

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I bleed blue. I have been so intertwined with IBM products for the last 15 years that I really don’t remember when my job did not include administration of Lotus Notes, Websphere Portal or even going as far back as cc:MAIL (yes…I know…IBM only bought the Lotus brand a few years back, but does it matter?).

In that time, I have watched Lotus Notes go from version 3.x (yes, I missed, or don’t remember v2.x) to the full glory of 8.5. There have been years that I have been an angry IT professional, and years where I was extremely proud of the product line Lotus was offering.

I have grown up in the industry learning from some amazingly brilliant people who understand the inner workings of the product better than I could ever pretend to know it. I have watched the word collaboration used loosely, to finally understanding what it really means, and I look forward to the future. I am a Domino and Websphere guy. It is what I do, and I am proud of it.

But we have hurdles to jump, we IBM fans. One of these hurdles is to break the legitimate grip Microsoft has on corporate America with their products, licensing game, and product quality. Microsoft Office is a great product, it works all of the time for me, and the tens of thousands of users I have supported over the years.

Telling a user they will be losing Microsoft Excel in favor of a Lotus/IBM product either makes them grin wildly (the fans of Lotus 1-2-3) or grimace with thoughts of the same product. Love it or hate it the bottom line is simple. Open Source applications like Symphony ARE going to save your corporation a lot of money. The question is simple: Can Symphony hold up and perform to the scrutiny of the power user?

Over the next few days I am going to take a look at each application in the suite. But more importantly, I am going to uninstall my Office 2007 completely, and give Symphony 1.3 all my time. I will let you know how it goes, and I hope you will comment and let me know what you think of the product also. Maybe together, we can learn something.

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