Plugin for IBM Lotus Symphony?

John Stafford · February 5, 2008

Hi: I'm tinkering with the latest beta of Lotus Symphony - I quite like it and it 's getting much better. It seems to be built from OO so was wondering if a Zotero plugin might be designed for it. Thanks for your great work. I appreciate Zotero. John

sgsong · November 25, 2008

Now Symphony has advanced to v.1.2. and it looks pretty good. I will be highly desirable to have a Zotero plugin for it.

mahood · January 19, 2009

Today they made Symphony entirely open source, so a plugin would be great

Tjowens · January 20, 2009

You can use Zotero's drag and drop functionality with any word processor. At this point supporting Word and OpenOffice plugins, across a variety of platforms, takes a considerable amount of energy. If someone wants to take this and run with it that would be great, otherwise I would encourage Lotus users, and for that matter users of any other unsupported word processing platform, to either use Zotero's drag and drop bibliography tools or switch to Word or OpenOffice to take advantage of tighter integration that the plugin's provide.

bdarcus · January 20, 2009

Or, it might be valuable for Symphony users to research what's involved in writing plug-ins. Given that the suite is based on OOo, I can imagine it might be feasible to run OOo plug-ins as well.

jprater · June 29, 2010

Any updates on this? Are there any plans on offering Lotus Symphony support, especially with their new version 3 release?

bdarcus · June 29, 2010

I noticed nobody answered my question, so I asked someone I know at IBM. His answer was:

Did you stumble upon this page for the Symphony Developer Toolkit?

http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/developers.nsf/home

That is the main information page, with a link to download the toolkit.

Symphony, since it is embedded in the Eclipse framework, it encourage
extensions via that model, e.g., as Eclipse plug-ins. This makes the most
sense for our enterprise customers since they typically use other IBM
products that are also embedded in Eclipse, like Notes and Sametime. So
using this common framework we can create widgets that work across
applications.

I don't believe that OpenOffice and Symphony plugins are drop-in
compatible. However the Symphony tookit does allow access to the UNO API,
same as OpenOffice, so it may be possible to write a "two-headed"
extension where most of the code is common.

So no, they're not compatible. But it might not be that hard to do, reusing a fair bit of the existing OOo plugin code.

I do think this is a perfect opportunity for someone other than Zotero developers though. The OOo plug-in, for example, was originally developed by someone outside the project.