Lotus Symphony Beta 2 released

Remember my post about IBM Lotus Symphony last September? Maybe not, maybe yes. But I bet you know or heard already about Lotus Symphony. Anyway, just this few days ago, maybe around the first week of November, Lotus Symphony Beta 2 was made available for downloads in their site and reportedly many people already downloaded the Beta 2.

Then, let us see what are those new features they have (taken from Symphony Buzz website):

In the Beta 2 release, we have made improvements in a number of areas including installation, performance, stability, usability and quality.

Installation – The installation is now a one click install, just click on the downloaded install file and the install begins. This simplified process eliminates installation difficulties some users had with Beta 1 because users needed to look for setup.exe after the self-extracting zip file is inflated.

Icon View & Background page — Users have complained that there are too many Symphony icons on desktop and Start menu. Now with Beta 2, you will see one single Symphony icon after the installation as oppose to 3 application icons in Beta 1. When you launch Symphony, you will see a Home page from which you can launch any of the 3 applications, go to the Symphony website for more information or directly to the Support Forums to join discussions.

Performance — We have made performance improvement in Beta 2 around presentation document loading and saving, for both the Microsoft Powerpoint presentations and Open Office presentations (ODP). For example time to load a Powerpoint file is reduced up to 50%, and time to save a Open Office presentation file is reduced up to 40%.

Stability — Some code refactoring has been done to make the infrastructure more robust and stable. A number of application crash issues have been resolved and fixed in the code as well.

Usability — There is a number of usability enhancement for all three editors. Just to list a couple here. We added two new icons in the drawing toolbar, the “Select” icon and the straight “Lines” icon. Landscape printing is now supported in Symphony Spreadsheets. And demoting/promoting numbers & bullets level inside a textbox is supported in Symphony Presentations.

Quality — A big number of bug fixes made into Beta 2, couple of hundred bugs have been fixed as matter of fact.