Ha ha ha. I couldn't make this shit up if I tried. The brains trust at IBM have decided that the way to fight the Office behemoth is to jump 20 years into the past and revive Symphony.
Actually, only the name is being dug up from the grave. The old name is being stuck onto an old version of OpenOffice. Oh, and they have somehow managed to make this bastardised version chew up a whole gigabyte of RAM (as opposed to 128 megabyte for OpenOffice - WTF?!?). The beastmaster must be quivering in his boots.
But, "its free", say IBM. Well "free" somehow becomes less appealing to me when I have to shell out for RAM upgrades on my entire PC fleet, or I have to frig around recoding all my Office macros that will not work anymore, or I can't open any password protected Office files, or if I have to shut all my other apps just to get this furball to load. That's pretty expensive for "free".
Ok, partial credit for running with ODF for the file format, but...
The killer is that since IBM is not offering 100% fidelity with Office doc conversions, I have to manually check each and every document that moves between Office and ODF formats to check for crapulent conversion errors. I know there's nothing better for my workers to do, so no problem right? From this non-functionality alone, the product fails. Its not getting into my enterprise, and I bet it won't get into yours, until fidelity reaches 99.9% or better.
Are you listening, IBM? If you are going to launch a product with the "enterprise-grade" label, get the product to an enterprise-usable state that is acceptable for actual enterprises. Duh!
Am I being a bit harsh? Post a comment and let me know. But, until I see a roadmap from IBM that gets this frankenstein creation up to scratch I will remain suspicious. Actually, given IBM's track record at hitting release dates, I don't want a roadmap - I will not be happy until I see real code that really works.
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1 comment:
Kenny,
I feel your pain. I created a document in MS-Word 2003, a colleague checked it in Symphony made a change and basically destroyed the document, (formatting, TOC, Headings).
I have to admit that I was perplexed why IBM would go to the trouble of using open source technology and then have the release version stuck at a version almost 3 years ago. One of the points of opensource is to be able support improved integration without the dramas of "upgrade churn" and legacy compatibility. So, a static version that is this old in their latest edition of Lotus Notes has issues. There is no announcement I have seen yet about what they are doing about it. (But I haven't read all the Lotusphere blogs yet)
The feature set for Open Office/Symphony needs to be near or equal to office 2000 or 2003 to make trouble for MS. But this is at least another 12 months away. IBM has committed (35) developers to the effort, so it will be interesting to see if they can get it right... IBM and MS are notorious for releasing software that's just not ready. Dunno why they plan furry release dates before completing a detailed requirements spec and a project plan.....
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