Linked by Jordan Spencer Cunningham on Thu 17th Sep 2009 20:49 UTC, submitted by poundsmack
"Quoting an inside source, the German economic newspaper, 'Handelsblatt' reports that staff at IBM have been given ten days to change to Symphony, IBM's in-house Lotus software. The use of Microsoft Office will in future require managerial approval. With immediate affect, the Open Document Format (ODF) will rule at IBM with the file ending .doc soon belonging to the past... IBM's management have obviously decided to practice what they preach. 330,000 IBM workers already use Symphony, reports the newspaper. The motive for the migration appears not to be the saving of license fees, and according to an IBM press officer, the move is a clear statement in appreciation of open source standards."
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Member since:2005-07-06
I agree with you that the the Symphony interface is the way OOo should go rather than some attempt to copy the repulsive productivity killing counter intuitive Office 2007 Ribbon. I like the tabbed interface and find it helpful in keeping track of all the documents, spreadsheets and presentations you have open while working on a project.
However the Symphony UI is built on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform which is why Symphony is so bloated. I would not want the OOo developers to add this additional this extra bloat to OOo. The current Symphony is built on the OOo 2 tree. IBM is working on updating it. Therefore as a working office suite OOo 3.1 is far superior but the Symphony interface is nice even if it insists on using Windows like widgets on Linux.
So I use OOo 3.1.1 in preference.
However the Symphony UI is built on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform which is why Symphony is so bloated. I would not want the OOo developers to add this additional this extra bloat to OOo. The current Symphony is built on the OOo 2 tree. IBM is working on updating it. Therefore as a working office suite OOo 3.1 is far superior but the Symphony interface is nice even if it insists on using Windows like widgets on Linux.
So I use OOo 3.1.1 in preference.
I've got nothing wrong with the Eclipse Rich Client Platform if the net result is something that is easier to port to other platforms; the complaints you made seem to centre on the need to optimise the JVM more than anything else. I hope with the work on OpenJDK that improvements with optimisation will occur although I'd prefer to see the focus put on adding Java support to LLVM
RE[2]: Comment by kaiwai
by coolstuck on Sat 19th Sep 2009 07:36
in reply to "RE: Comment by kaiwai"
Member since:2009-09-19
I agree completely. The ribbon interface is awful - it's the Vista disaster all over again. I've heard loads of reports from long time Office users about how they simply can't find things with the ribbon UI.
Symphony is much better (as much as I loathe IBM). But having it inside the eclipse RCP is a disaster. OOo does so much more than Symphony does, but uses half as much resources.
OOo should just follow the Symphony UI design, but keep OOo much lighter.
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Member since:
2005-11-02
I hope that IBM makes all these changes available to OpenOffice.org - as far as I remember they aren't required to do so but it would provide a great lift to OpenOffice.org on the average user desktop especially Linux on the desktop and netbook.
I agree with you that the the Symphony interface is the way OOo should go rather than some attempt to copy the repulsive productivity killing counter intuitive Office 2007 Ribbon. I like the tabbed interface and find it helpful in keeping track of all the documents, spreadsheets and presentations you have open while working on a project.
However the Symphony UI is built on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform which is why Symphony is so bloated. I would not want the OOo developers to add this additional this extra bloat to OOo. The current Symphony is built on the OOo 2 tree. IBM is working on updating it. Therefore as a working office suite OOo 3.1 is far superior but the Symphony interface is nice even if it insists on using Windows like widgets on Linux.
So I use OOo 3.1.1 in preference.