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Lotus SmartSuite Millennium Edition

Dump your keyboard, it's got ViaVoice!

by Jack Corcoran

 

Lotus SmartSuite Millennium Edition Box.REMEMBER the briefings in the old "Mission Impossible" series? "If you should choose to accept ... " Of course it was always impossible, and of course they always accepted, and of course they always succeeded.

When IBM's Lotus project manager was called in and told that his assignment, should he choose to accept, was to go out and grab Microsoft's 80% share of the desktop office software market, the theme from "Mission Impossible" had to rattle his ear drums. But he accepted the challenge, realizing there were only two things he had to do: (1) build a better product, and (2) convince people to try it.

A better product

The presentation at the September general meeting of DACS showed IBM's success in achieving at least the first of these goals: IBM has built a superior product whose features outshine the current Microsoft Office suite. We saw elements of the Lotus SmartSuite Millennium Edition in action, and it looked good.

Lotus FastSite Screen ShotSmartSuite has ten components that work together to provide a spectrum of office services. Word processing is provided by WordPro, and spreadsheets by the classic 1-2-3. Presentation facilities are integrated with Web access so that users can present documents over the Web as easily as they can generate hard copy. FastSite, Approach, Freelance Graphics, and ScreenCam combine to provide a comprehensive, coordinated presentation capability. Scheduling and information management are handled in Organizer. SmartCenter facilitates accessing the various capabilities, and Doc OnLine is there when you need help.

It's all there. The basic office environment for everybody--and everything that most people will ever need or use. Lotus has made a great effort to make life easier for the user. The various applications work together, support data transfer amongst each other where it makes sense to do so, and uses as much commonality as possible. As an essential marketing strategy, SmartSuite can read in data files from practically any source. This includes Microsoft Office, Oracle, SAP, and several others.

In a very impressive extra, SmartSuite includes IBM's ViaVoice speech recognition software, which allows you to train the system to recognize your voice so you can talk data into WordPro instead of having to type it in.

This very impressive suite was introduced at PC Expo in June and is now becoming available from all the usual sources. The upgrade price is $149 and apparently practically anything you have in office software qualifies you for a competitive upgrade.

Preparing you to defect

As for second part of IBM's mission, Lotus sent in Joseph C Hureau from New York to convince DACS users to use the new SmartSuite.

Joe came in with an attitude: an arsenal of Microsoft slams, an in-your-face presentation, and a late-night-show delivery. Fortunately for our audience, the Danbury area is culturally greater New York, so we capice. But I hope Lotus doesn't let Joe out of the Tri-State area.

The hit of the show was the demonstration of ViaVoice, which Joe used with several of the applications. Voice entry will inevitably take over for data entry, and Joe made it clear why. When he spoke a set of tongue-twisters into the system, ViaVoice handled them flawlessly, bringing a round of applause from the audience. It was obviously a well-practiced set, but the translation was still impressive. Joe also gave us some excellent advice on how to begin training a voice recognition system.

Weaknesses

Any system as large and complicated as SmartSuite will lack something--no system can do everything. Several knowledgeable people in the DACS audience asked in-depth questions that identified some of these problems, such as Lotus SmartSuite inability to pick up address books from Lotus Notes.

Joe's response to these criticisms was contemporary performance art. In a polished, spinmeister tour de force, he identified with the critic, proclaiming that he too had complained about that very matter to his Lotus management. Their failure to implement his advice was the problem, and he emphatically told us that he was "pissed off" about it. Four times during the evening he used this technique, combining the best (or the worst?) of Washington, D.C., and invoking the image of Dilbert management. Joe is really wasting his time in the computer field.

Lotus generously donated four copies of SmartSuite Millennium Edition to our end-of-meeting raffle. I was one of the lucky winners. I installed the full system the next day on my NT 4.0 system and was relieved that the Lotus elements installed easily. IBM ViaVoice had a few awkward and confusing moments fitting in with the Lotus software, but eventually it all worked together. (ViaVoice co-habits with my Dragon NaturallySpeaking system, even using the same microphone,)

Lotus WordPro looks much like Microsoft Word to me and reads all my .DOC files. Lotus 1-2-3 looks just like Microsoft Excel to me and handled all my .XLS files.

The upshot?

This is my first experience with Lotus products and I am well pleased with SmartSuite. I'll use it in place of my Office 95 applications. The Suite looks good to me. It does load up the Startup folder and insinuate itself into your life with menu bars and taskbar icons, but one can deal with that.

Joe's presentation was pretty much a showcase for himself. The audience had comparatively few questions, and the presentation clocked in at 53 minutes total--the shortest at a DACS general meeting in some time. Just as well.



Jack Corcoran is an old, retired computer programmer who just discovered that he has an attitude.


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