Portable IBM Lotus Symphony 3 Fixpack3

Update 26 May 2012:
- now if somehow symphony stopped working (not started), deleting 'IBM' folder will reset settings
- revert to use soffice.bin since some featured hardcoded to this, thus do not run openoffice with symphony
- in 64-bit windows symphony didn't quit cleanly, fixed
- workaround for path with spaces 

Update 12 May 2012:
Apparently IBM has discontinued Lotus Symphony, what a shame :( (last version is 3.0.1)  so I decided to update this:
Portable Lotus Symphony 3.0.1 fixpack 1 All languages 194 MB or
Launcher only (to run pre-installed symphony 3.0.1 unmodified in portable mode) 678KB

Notes:
- Although this was less than half smaller of original installer (570MB), it is really full version :)
- All jars and zips were unpacked so you may experience slightly better responsiveness
- Startup (as older version) also has been tweaked, it should be significantly faster than the original, especially after first run
- Although IBM has offered Symphony to Apache OpenOffice as open source, do note that this download remain illegal except the launcher download


A continuation of my guide here, I made small launcher (basically a 7-zip SFX) to make Lotus Symphony a little more portable. This is based on version 3 with fixpack 3, the SFX installer will extract to PortableSymphony3 folder from there run launcher.exe (symphony.exe.bak - the original launcher- has been renamed as I don't use it).

Unlike the original Symphony this one will kill soffice.bin (file has been renamed to prevent conflict) after exit to make it usable in removable drive. One caveat: don't run multiple instance of it... but that shouldn't be an issue as it was a multitabbed office anyway.

If you wish you could manually extract it with 7-zip

Portable Lotus Symphony 3 125 MB
md5: 8c85538e10d804136e4d394f6b8a93cb

How to make IBM Symphony 3 portable

OK not that portable actually... Let's do it quick

Download it first http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/downloads/ls/symphony/index.html
Don't forget the fixpack
Install...

- get yourself to %USERPROFILE% a.k.a C:\Documents and Settings\[username] or C:\Users\[username]
- copy folder "IBM" to your Symphony 3's installation directory (where symphony.exe reside)
- navigate to framework\rcp there you'll find rcplauncher.properties
- open it with notepad (your should be an admin)
- replace rcp.data's value with IBM/Lotus/Symphony/ -> rcp.data=IBM/Lotus/Symphony/
- save it
- now copy the whole Symphony folder to your removable drive and use symphony.exe to run it. Your settings and preferences should stored in IBM\Lotus\Symphony\

caveat: soffice.bin process will stay at background when you quit Symphony's tray icon so you can't eject your drive unless kill the process first
note: Lotus Symphony 3 is an intuitive but a bit slower version of OpenOffice 3

IBM Lotus Symphony 3 Released

Get it here also available for Mac and Linux
Additional spell check dicts here

Review will come later.. but from changelog, IBM seems didn't do their homework to speedup their most undergone OpenOffice variant, one thing for sure they are more OOO 3.x compliant and that's how version 3 jumped from 1.3. Do we go for LibreOffice?

Hmm.. so far this version is more responsive than 1.3 but startup still slower than any OpenOffice 3.2 notably Novell's and still only offer the basic trio of OpenOffice. Strangely if you quit Symphony it left soffice.bin process hang in there, maybe for startup caching purpose?

I will keep this as the sleekest OpenOffice for my hackintosh.