Call for Symphony plug-ins developers

Xiao Wei Hu, Programmability and L3 manager for Symphony  |  Mar 25, 2008 4:46 AM
Profile image for Xiao Wei Hu There are several plug-in examples in Symphony toolkit and on the web site. We will continue publish more plug-in examples. We hope more developers will contribute to Symphony by building plug-ins for it as well as for Notes and Sametime.

The plug-ins can be trivial like showing local weather/stock prices or complex ones like a front end of BI solution software (Hyperion or Cognus). The plug-ins could enable end users to retrieve data and embed them to documents (report or presentation). An equation editor provider like MathType can build plug-ins for different document authors. For example, equation editors for chemists that include lot of chemist formulas.

We can help you publish the information of your plug-ins on Symphony web site and point to your web site for end users to download and try them.

If you are a software application developer, please consider using Symphony in your solutions for business document editing like contracts, orders. Being its self a set of Eclipse plug-ins, Symphony can be used as a component in solutions on top of Eclipse/Lotus Expeditor.

If you are constructing solutions for enterprise that may includes document editing, please considering how to make the end user more productive by integrating document management with other business applications. You will see the benefit of the open document format and the open integration framework.

You may also re-brand Symphony to make it a special editor for particular users or tasks. For example, a medical record editor to help doctor record patient information, issue treatment order and keep treatment result. The editor could get data from other systems (HIS, LIS, PACS) and provide suggestion and alert by scanning symptoms and prescriptions in the document. The resulted document becomes the most complete medical record for future study and reference.

The open framework of Eclipse makes the performance looks not as good as the office suite built from proprietary C/C++ code. It can be solved by pre-loading the libraries (include Java) into memory. The approach is used by the proprietary suite vendor to make it looks running fast.

If you want to build a plug-in but have issues, please post messages at developer forum.

15 Comments

  • Mhamed BJ said on Mar 25, 2008 10:15 AM:

    How can I integrate ESSBASE (Figure 2) ??? this is very usefu l!!

    Thanks

  • Guest said on Mar 25, 2008 8:39 PM:

    Is there any (relatively simple) way to utilize Documents to edit data already resident in an xml file, e.g. one output from another program. Something along the lines of XForms perhaps?

  • Xiaowei Hu said on Mar 29, 2008 8:47 PM:

    Figure 2 is the screen shot of a sample plug-in that show integrate Symphony with ESSBASE. We plan to publish it soon. ODF support XFORM model. There are APIs to exchange XFORM data between the document in Symphony and other systems. For general XML editing, a plug-in is needed as a filter between the internal model and the document in the xml format.

  • Romario said on Apr 16, 2008 3:54 AM:

    Pode-se usar este software como um hypertext como o antigo Black Magic ou o Hyperwriter?

  • Romario said on Apr 16, 2008 3:57 AM:

    Ando procurando um software que possa ser utilizado como hipertexto (como possibilidade de serem criadas páginas html) mas que sirva para ser utilizado como o Black Magic antigo. Não estou conseguindo encontrar.

  • Felix said on Apr 18, 2008 1:13 PM:

    Your Blog and Buzz sections are a JOKE!

    Where are the updates?

    When will the product be released?

    Will there be another beta?

    Is there anybody there?

  • vlada said on Apr 28, 2008 9:55 AM:

    Is there any way to retrieve data from DB2 (for System i) to Symphony spreadsheet? Import using ODBC?

    Thanks

  • Guerdy said on May 2, 2008 11:43 AM:

    i like it

  • test said on May 7, 2008 11:30 PM:

    test

  • David said on May 22, 2008 2:41 PM:

    Holy cow! I had been thinking along these lines, moving a database application to the Eclipse platform, and Symphony is a great example of how to go about doing it right. Kudos!

  • Jenny for said on May 30, 2008 2:22 AM:

    I agree!

  • Stewart Hurry said on Jun 19, 2008 11:22 PM:

    You could take the old Amipro macro capabilities and include them as a Symphony plugin

  • Jean-Marc Corbeil said on Sep 3, 2008 5:15 PM:

    One problem recurrent with Lotus Symphony on both my computers is speed. Opening the app can be awfully slloooow. Browsing also is slow, very slow. Suggestion: Is it possible to integrate with Google's Chrome instead of IE. Chrome is awfully fast, is Open Source and has received the blessing (and congratulations) from Mozilla!

  • John L said on Jan 1, 2009 2:34 AM:

    OK, if writing a stock price plug-in is trivial, WHERE IS IT?

    Thanks

  • Blast said on Jan 10, 2010 10:35 PM:

    Is there any way to retrieve data from DB2 (for System i) to Symphony spreadsheet? Import using ODBC?

    Please help I need to know on how to sync Lotus Symphony to ODBC... I know this is possible but I don't know how...
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