The Ways for Enterprises to use IBM Lotus Symphony
Lotus Symphony is designed to handle the majority of office tasks, the Lotus Symphony tools support the Open Document Format (ODF), enabling organizations to access, use, and maintain their documents over the long term without worrying about end-of-life uncertainties or ongoing software licensing and royalty fees. By using tools that support ODF, customers are not locked into one particular vendor for their productivity tools.
You may know that IBM Lotus Symphony can not only meet the daily office work within the enterprise, but also can be developed and extended easily. We will introduce some common Scenarios about using Lotus Symphony for your reference. All these scenarios are summarized from Lotus Symphony really user cases. Lotus Symphony have millions download after the first release on website. More and more users use Lotus Symphony to finish their daily job: the legal department uses documents to manage its contracts. A deal making team uses documents to make proposals to clients. The education department creates education and training material using presentations. The Marketing department uses documents to create publications and pricing guides. The Sales department uses spreadsheet applications to determine potential client sales, or to forecast product sales in different countries, or to calculate a winning bid to a client.
With the promotion of legal software, more and more enterprises are facing the pressure to pay the high cost of office suite. The emergence of Lotus Symphony offers a good choice for enterprise customers to solve the pressure on IT departments. IBM Lotus Symphony is free for all users. You can customize, extend and modify Lotus Symphony by your requirements. You won't meet any legal issues after you use IBM Lotus Symphony in your enterprise.
Lotus Symphony can handle most tasks. Lotus Symphony is qualified for most of their daily document processing work, and there is only one thing to notice that you need to change some of the inherent usage habits. Lotus Symphony has been in compliance with the user-friendly principle. 80% of the features that you need to use in office work can be accessed by clicking the Lotus Symphony Properties panel, such as modifying font attributes, paragraph properties, graphic properties and so on. If you don't find your needed functions from the Properties panel, you can click the More options button to select the features from the displayed window. Lotus Symphony supports multiple file formats, so you can easily export the document to PDF format and can very easily convert a document from the default ODF format to other document formats. This support for multiple file formats enables you to exchange documents with other people easily.
As Lotus Symphony is powerful, easy to use and completely free, many enterprises regard Lotus Symphony as the first choice for office software.
Suppose an enterprise has 1,000 employees, and it has to pay 500$ each year for each employee for the office suite. If all departments use Lotus Symphony, the enterprise will save 500,000$ a year. If 80% of the employees use Lotus Symphony, the enterprise will save 400,000$ a year.
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Most Lotus Notes developers are familiar with the limitations of publishing in Lotus Notes. Developers frequently need to create mail merges with data in Lotus Notes applications, create reports with specific formatting, or enable extra functionality, such as a DataPilot table. Lotus Notes does not natively support these features.
Beginning with Lotus Notes 8, the IBM Lotus Symphony productivity suite is included as an optional no-charge application that can be installed with the Lotus Notes client.
It includes these applications:
- Lotus Symphony Documents, a word processor
- Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets, a spreadsheet program
- Lotus Symphony Presentations, a presentation program
As a Lotus Notes developer, you can develop publishing solutions that take advantage of the Lotus Symphony toolkit for Lotus Notes. This toolkit offers capabilities for creating solutions that publish information stored in Lotus Notes databases. The toolkit is supported in Lotus Notes 8.5.1 and later. With Lotus Symphony LotusScript API, you can begin fully controlling Lotus Symphony in Lotus Notes application, performing such actions as creating or opening documents, passing text, and formatting that text. Surely you also can use Lotus Symphony COM interface to control Symphony documents in your LotusScript codes. But we are highly recommend you to use Lotus Symphony LotusScript API instead of use Lotus Symphony COM interface. It's more easily and more readable.
This screen capture demonstrates how LotusScript can be used to call Lotus Symphony functions to import Notes and Domino data into Lotus Symphony, change the style and color of the cell range, create a bar chart and even provide an intuitive data entry user interface. This example is similar to the Zetabank example above... but instead of using UNO component model and Eclipse plug-ins, this example was created using LotusScript. With Lotus Symphony's support for multiple development models, you can decide how you want to build your solutions.
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With the demand for office suite not limited to a single document content operation, and with the development of enterprise information, business documents are no longer isolated. More and more documents must interact with business information systems, and the information in documents comes from a variety of information sources. Lotus Symphony is based on Eclipse technology, which is easy to be customized and extended, so many enterprises choose to use Lotus Symphony as an application platform. You need build a Symphony plugin to share data between enterprise business applications with Lotus Symphony. With Lotus Symphony JAVA API you can handle events in a file such as open, save or close a document, or a cell value changing or a object be selected. And with the JAVA API you can control most of the objects in a file, such as tables, fields, paragraphs, pictures, sheet, charts and so on. With Lotus Symphony JAVA API you can build your own plugin to make your Lotus Symphony more powerful and make your productivity be improved.
For example, the development teams at Lotus used these APIs to create a plug-in for back-end integration and UI customization, enabling users to easily save Lotus Symphony content directly into Lotus QuickrTM.
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The Lotus Symphony Developer Toolkit for creating Eclipse plug-ins provides documentation as well as samples and tutorials that you need to build your plug-ins.
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Lotus Symphony is not only an extensible application platform, but capable of being used as a productivity tools component in Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) system. With more and more enterprises using Eclipse RCP as the development framework for application systems, most of which have a document processing capability. Many times these document processing functions are implemented by using COM interfaces to connect with and control Microsoft Office, or using the Eclipse SWT components. Both of these implementations require a lot of code development work and is difficult to achieve. Lotus Symphony provides easy to use Java interfaces, which simplifies documents creation and manipulation. Therefore, as the productivity tools component in RCP system, Lotus Symphony is another choice for enterprises. To use Lotus Symphony as a editor component you must have a custom Lotus Symphony package. All the Lotus Expeditor related codes are removed. Additionally, your application must base on Eclipse RCP.
Following is a screenshot from one Lotus Symphony RCP demo.
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IBM Lotus Expeditor Client for Desktop is a client offering that provides a run-time environment and integrated middleware components for extending many enterprise applications to server-managed laptop computers and desktop systems. This client-side services-oriented framework enables applications to run locally while the system is disconnected from the network and provides synchronization of data, transactions, and applications when reconnected. Many Lotus Products are base on lotus Expeditor such as Lotus Notes, Lotus Sametime, and Lotus Symphony.
Using Lotus Symphony In Lotus Expeditor is easy, you only need to install the Lotus Symphony update site to Lotus Expeditor client. You can find the Lotus Symphony update site package updateSite.zip by unzipping the Lotus Symphony's installer. After you finish the installation, you find three menu entries added to the Open Launcher list. You may use Lotus Symphony in your Lotus Expeditor Application through the Lotus Symphony Java API or the OpenOffice.org Universal Network Object (UNO) API.
Following is a screenshot from Lotus Symphony in Lotus Expeditor.
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Lotus Symphony not only support ODF file format but also support Microsoft Office file format and some others file formats. With Lotus Symphony you can convert one file format to another easily. Some enterprises use Lotus Symphony to act as a Documents Conversion Service Provider in their server side application. The server side applications can be run on Windows, Linux and Mac platform. AIX is not be supported by Lotus Symphony. For the enterprise who want to deal their ODF file on AIX platform, they can use the ODF toolkit. To use Lotus Symphony in server side, you must install a copy of Lotus Symphony on the server side. Normally Lotus Symphony start the core office service as a local pipe. To connect the core office service you must know the pipe name. In Symphony stand-alone the name is hidden for users. If you want use Symphony document service in your application, you must start Symphony in you own way via batch, command line, or programmatic execution. . After you connect to the document service with your own parameters successfully, you can use the UNO API to do the document conversion and to manipulate the content of document.
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Lotus Symphony software supports Microsoft's Automation technology. This offers programmers the possibility to control Lotus Symphony from external programs. There is a range of efficient IDEs and tools available for developers to choose from. Automation is language independent. The respective compilers or interpreters must, however, support Automation. The compilers transform the source code into Automation compatible computing instructions. For example, the string and array types of your language can be used without caring about their internal representation in Automation, which is BSTR and SAFEARRAY. A client program that controls Lotus Symphony can be represented by an executable (Visual Basic, C++) or a script (JScript, VB Script). The latter requires an additional program to run the scripts, such as Windows Scripting Host (WSH) or Internet Explorer.
Universal Network Object (UNO) was not designed to be compatible with Automation and COM, although there are similarities. Lotus Symphony deploys a bridging mechanism provided by the Automation Bridge to make UNO and Automation work together. The bridge consists of UNO services, however, it is not necessary to have a special knowledge about them to write Automation clients for Lotus Symphony.
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Not all the Ways for Enterprises to use IBM Lotus Symphony are be introduced. Only some common scenarios be shown. We hope this article can help you to understand how IBM Lotus Symphony can help you and your enterprise. You are welcomed to provide feedback and scenarios to us, We will support you about using and deploying IBM Lotus Symphony in your enterprise. For more details, please refer to DeveloperWorks article “Understanding the Ways for Enterprises to use IBM Lotus Symphony”
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Open Document Format (ODF) is an open standard document format. ODF documents can be manipulated by IBM Lotus Symphony, both interactively, by users, as well as programmatically using the Symphony SDK. In addition, you can programmatically create, read and modify ODF documents using the lightweight Simple Java API for ODF. Using the Simple Java API does not require that Symphony be installed, and is ideal for working with ODF documents on a Java application server.
More information on ODF can be found here: http://opendocument.xml.org/
More information on the Simple Java API for ODF can be found here: http://odftoolkit.org/projects/simple/pages/Home
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Here is a list of additional resources.
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