IBM Lotus Symphony - History

History

Symphony has its roots in the IBM Workplace Managed Client component of IBM Workplace. In 2006, IBM introduced Workplace Managed Client version 2.6, which included "productivity tools" — a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation program — that supported ODF. Later that year, IBM announced that Lotus Notes 8, which already incorporated Workplace technology, would also include the same productivity tools as the Workplace Managed Client. In 2007, IBM released Notes 8, and then released Notes' productivity tools as a standalone application, Symphony, in a beta one month later. The code in Symphony is the same as that for Notes 8's productivity tools.

IBM released version 1.0 of Lotus Symphony in May 2008 as a free download, and introduced three minor upgrades through 2008 and 2009. In 2010, IBM released version 3.0. It incorporated code from OpenOffice.org 3.x, and includes enhancements such as new sidebars in its user interface and support for Visual Basic for Applications macros, OpenDocument Format 1.2, and OLE. Symphony 3.0 was originally planned to include other existing OpenOffice.org modules, including an equation editor, database software, and a drawing program.

The software is developed by IBM China Development Laboratory, located in Beijing.

On 13 July 2011, IBM announced that it would donate Lotus Symphony to the Apache Foundation.

On 23 January 2012, IBM announced version 3.0.1 would be the last version Lotus Symphony, and their efforts would be going into the Apache OpenOffice project. When Apache OpenOffice version 4.0 is released, IBM plans to release an IBM Edition that will come with extensions to integrate it with their other products. Even though they did release a fixpack update afterwards on 27 March 2012.

In 2012 IBM announced that it intended to integrate the symphony UI into openoffice.

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