I have been using Notes 8 now for about 3 weeks solid. In that time I was trying to use Symphony as the word processor to produce a requirements doc that was intended for the client's desk for review. Time is of the essence in these situations, as you want to keep the momentum going so the client will buy into what you are going to do to. I started with the Symphony Documents. Quite a reasonable word processor til things start getting a little serious and you want some sensible numbering for paragraphs/sections and doing a TOC's.

MS-Word also has trouble with this as well, as it tries to "help me" by second guessing what I am trying to do. However, it's alot easier in comparison. In the end I had to wave the white-flag as the document got more and more detailed in structure, the effort required to re-do numbering in Symphony was becoming un-workable. So I re-formatted and completed the document in MS-Word.

Although, I would like to endorse MS-Office alternatives, producing "client quality" documentation possesses some risks if using Symphony in this release. That's not to say that it will evolve, but this flavour of Open Office although functional, is still "scrappy" and cumbersome to use for heavy duty publishing. You have to admit that after 10 years of development MS-Office is quite mature, so Star Office still has big boots to fill. I still use Office 2000 at home and 2003 at work so I would say that 2000 is the competitive benchmark because releases after that are somewhat superfluous. I have noticed alot of hype in pushing Symphony as a contender, but from what I have experienced so far, there is still at least few releases before Symphony is going to rattle Microsoft's cage. But getting Symphony out there seemlessly to 120 million-ish users is the first step. Symphony's endearing features currently are it's ability to save ODF and PDF formats. I would hope they continue to work on "smartening up" the TOC capability and keeping the interface simple.