Skip to main content

Installing Lotus Symphony

After sitting on the fence for a while, trying not to show too much Lotus bias, I finally decided to give Lotus Symphony a trial.

For the record, my work PC is old..
It's an IBM 8194 P4 2.8GHz with 3GB RAM and not a lot of available hard drive space.

Downloading and Installing
I went to the IBM Symphony site (http://symphony.lotus.com) and selected the Windows version and in the English Language. I've got lots of issues with IBM's downloading services - I really don't think they're designed for lay-people. I decided to play "dumb" and just click on the first thing I saw. It defaulted to the Java applet which never works well on my system. I waited for the inevitable error message, then switched to downloading via html. The 197MB file downloaded relatively quickly.

IBM - The download facility for this is too user-unfriendly for the people you really want to capture as users. It should be as easy as downloading Mozilla Firefox or Open Office.

When the download was finished, I Double-clicked on the EXE and it started extracting to a folder determined by the TEMP/TMP environment variable. I was a bit miffed that I didn't have any choice about where these temporary files went - as they consume about 266 MB of additional disk space. I cancelled the setup and changed my environment variables - the next try was much better.

As far as the rest of the install process was concerned, it was fairly straightforward and gave me the ability to choose locations etc. The overall consumption was to be 494.6 MB.

The only other installation issue I had was the fact that for some bizarre reason, my McAfee Anti-Virus scanner decided to sit at about 90% during the entire installation process. Eventually I closed the McAfee task and all worked beautifully. I'll blog another time about Anti-Virus and whether they are appropriate in today's world or not.


Working with Symphony
Wow... I was expecting a long load time with Symphony but it seems to start faster than MS Office.

Symphony seemed to work well with my word processing documents and power point slides but didn't preserve the charts from my Excel 97 spreadsheets terribly well. I'll have a bit more of a "play" and provide an update later.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How to Change Your Notification Options for New Lotus Notes Mail in version 8.x

Don't worry, I'm not patronizing you (my readers), I just decided to re-document this for one of our internal users and thought you might want to be able to use it in your own user documentation. WHAT IS THIS DOCUMENT ABOUT? Some people who don't get a lot of mail, like to be notified when such an event occurs. Notification can be; via a sound via a pop-up box via the system tray (where the computer clock is) The pop up box looks like this; Other people, who like myself, get too much mail would rather not be notified. The aim of this document is to tell you how (and where) to turn these options on and off. CHANGING YOUR SETTINGS To change your settings from the Notes 8.x client; On the Menu, click File , then Preferences... On the left hand side , click on the little plus sign to the left of Mail to expand the options. Click on the option marked Sending and Receiving . In the middle section, under receiving, you can control your notifications. If you untick the box mark

How to Create an Auto-Response Mail Message in Lotus Notes 8.5.3+

Why would you do this? Suppose that you have an externally accessible generic email address for your company; support@mycompany.com or info@mycompany.com. You might expose this to the web and allow people to send messages to you. Setting up an auto-response email will tell the senders that their message reached its destination and that it will be dealt with accordingly.  It's also good practice to include links to FAQs or other useful information. Why 8.5.3 The techniques we'll be using here work in older versions of Notes but some of the options seem to have moved around in 8.5.3.  I figured it was a good time to show you where they've moved to. The Procedure Start Domino Designer and open the Mail file to be modified.  A really quick way to do this is to right-click on the application tab and choose "Open in Designer". In the Left hand panel of designer, expand Code and then double-click Agents.  A new window should appear. Click the action

How to Do a Mail Merge to Email using Lotus Notes

Why do one? In today's "green" world, it makes much better sense to send out emails than letters but you still want to personalize them. Sadly, by itself Lotus Notes doesn't support mail merge to email. Of course, we know that outlook does (but then it lets anyone and anything send emails for you - even when you don't want them to). So, how to do it in Notes? OpenNTF The first port of call is OpenNTF ( http://www.openntf.org/ ). This place is full of great things but most of them are really badly documented. Still, these guys give things away for free and they develop in their spare time, so we should be grateful for what we get. There's a great little project there called MailMerge Excel to Notes . Go there, click on releases and download the ZIP file. Getting to the Code The installation is tricky though I've noted that since I asked the author about the install, it's been updated (so maybe these steps are less necessary). Unzip the files to somewher