every year for the past probably five or so years i've gotten an invite to attend a dinner put on by symfoni tuesday night of lotusphere. the last few years i've tried to make it a point to go, even if i have other invitations to other things that conflict. there's just something really cool about hanging out with the scandinavians and learning new (for me anyway) words like tak and how to say cheers and so on.

this past dinner something really cool happened there that i have another blog post (still in draft) queued up to talk about. but for this post i wanted to write about symfoni's new global calendar product that they are about to launch (or maybe they have by now?) that has an Adobe Air front end. Trond showed it to me briefly one day at the Dolphin rotunda and i asked him to send me some data on it, and he did (pasted below).

i thought it was interesting that they were using Air to leverage their code to PC, Mac and Linux. and the Air UI looked pretty cool.

anyway here is the text from Trond's email (slightly edited). seems to me like these guys have been working really hard the last few years and have expanded their product line quite a lot. some of their old software was the standard clunky old Notes stuff some years ago, but these days everything looks really slick. i wouldn't be surprised if they've started penetrating the U.S. market with some of these products.

Hi John,

Here's a few screenshots, don't know if you wanna use any:

- http://twitpic.com/z6col (notes version)
- http://twitpic.com/yt8wr (notes version)
- http://twitpic.com/z6d4z (air version)
- http://twitpic.com/z6cxx (air version)

About Symfoni Global Calendar (GC):

GC collects calendar appointments from any user or groups of users in your organization (Domino or Exchange!), and gives you lots of ways to browse, consume and otherwise interact with this information. It answers questions like "where's my team now, or next week", "what is John doing tomorrow" etc. It even enables push-back of appointments from the client into someone's calendar (this is a role based right), so Sue at the front office can help me add "sick day" to my calendar because I CALLED IN sick... ALSO, the new version will support shorthand entry like "meeting with Tron tues 2pm-4:30 @corneroffice", OS notifications/popups like "your meeting is in 10 minutes" or "You're tracking John, he just finished his meeting".

GC has a classic Notes client and also a web interface, but this spring we're releasing the brand new standalone client based on the Adobe Air platform. This client runs on Mac/Linux/Windows, is light and fast yet integrates very well with the OS for start menu icons, popups, alerts etc.