LotusLive Symphony - aka Project Concord

To be honest, I have not really had a chance to drill into Project Concord, apart from to read Ed's blog post on the subject from Lotusphere .... 2010: -

We also demonstrated Project Concord, a set of collaborative web editors that will be part of the new LotusLive Labs in Q2 2010.  Project Concord is something I've talked to customers about in concept over the last year or so -- that when we started working on productivity as a set of web tools, we weren't just going to deliver yet another reinvented word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation tool.  Instead, this project demonstrates some very cool collaborative document editing, contextual commenting, smart tables, and task and attention management.  It is designed to work with installed editors (e.g. Symphony), browser users, and even mobile users.

So, today, thanks to my good friend, Mr Mike Spradbery ( aka @Spradders ) I had a quick poke about the product which, if I have got this right, will be called LotusLive Symphony at some point down the line.

It's available to try via this link.

In addition, it also APPEARS to be available here, as part of Lotus Connections on Greenhouse or, more specifically, here within the Files app.

Regardless of how you reach it, it's a very cool experience - you can upload a document ( I chose to upload MS Word file in .DOC format ) and then EDIT it live via the browser. This causes the original .DOC file to be converted to the OPEN Document Format (ODF) or, more specifically, to the .ODT format.

This gives me a very rich document editing experience, as good as any other RTE that I've used before, including the capability to paste in from Word documents, which I've seen as a key requirement within Lotus WCM via Ephox EditLive! etc.

Having played around, I then saved and closed the document, and shared it with Mike as an editor.

I was then able to back into the document and, via the Tools -> Tasks -> Assign a section menu, I assigned a section of the document to Mike. This generated a new Activity into Mike was automatically added. This then notified him and, as I type this blog post in Evolution, I can see my  Firefox tab flashing away in the menu bar. When I checked the Firefox tab, I can see Mike's in like Flynn, editing away within the document.

So, to summarise, I can upload or create a new document, share it with team members as editors, assign them sections of the document on which to work, and they can start editing ALL IN REAL TIME.

Oh, and did I mention that I can choose to export the document in PDF format, RIGHT OUT OF THE BROWSER ?

Now, I've only used Google Docs once before when I recorded an episode of the Oscar-nominated This Week in Lotus podcast. Therefore, I'm assuming that there'll be a fair deal of feature comparison between the two, but I'll leave other more tech-savvy people to do the comparison.

In short, CHECK IT OUT - it's really rather cool.

*UPDATE* As per the comments, I've added some screenshots. I can also confirm that, for me, I can only create documents and spreadsheets; I'm not sure whether there is a plan to offer presentations at some later date.