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Mozilla Lightning to Challenge Outlook
MS IE Bug Finder writes "Although Microsoft is dismissing Mozilla Lightning, the article indicates the combination of Thunderbird (mail) with Sunbird (calendaring) should be a worthy opponent against Outlook by the middle of the new year." Reader EvilStein adds a link to the Lightning Q&A.
I do not know about thunder/sunbird, but supposedly Evolution fits in well in such an environment and is OSS.
This doesn't stand a chance to beat Outlook. Outlook is a great but buggy program. Most offices these days depend on the features it has.
It will compete with Outlook express though.
Hey, 1998 called, they want their OS back.
No single app can crash windows 2000/XP.
Novell has developed Connector which is supposed to pull this off, the open source client currently using it is Evolution, but maybe the code can be re-used for this project as well...?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
You said:
> Sorry, but this time Microsoft wins. Sunbird is not even a complete piece of software. Last time I used it, not all the menu buttons even did anything.
The article said:
> should be a worthy opponent against Outlook by the middle of the new year."
Now... first of all, what was the last time you tried Sunbird? yesterday? 6 months ago?
Then, middle of the new year is kindof like 6 months from now...
I do not know if Sunbird is a good alternative or if it ever will be, but as you can read (or can you? past experience makes this a bit doubtfull) the claim was not that it is a good alternative now, but that it is growing into one and should be there some 6 months from now, so what exactly was your point besides wanting to be dismissive without having an argument?
I would be willing to use any Open Source client but the Outlook server won't allow any other client to connect to it other than MS Outlook. Any hints on how to trick the thing to let me use other clients.
There's no reason why Windows-based clones can't talk to Exchange - the MAPI Exchange client is independent of Outlook, IIRC, and the API is reasonably well documented. (Up to about '98, at least - the newer features aren't I think.)
The problem is only on other OSes. As others have mentioned, a few have tried.
Although Outlook is primarily a mail client it does have some 'nice' groupware abilities that businesses like. E.g. group calendaring and tasks and also shared contacts. Plus outlook forms can be very handy w.r.t. helpdesk systems, time sheets, etc etc.
Although of course with it being Microsoft it crashes more often than Holly Hunterin that Cronenberg movie.
'By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes'
and is it really surprising considering how immature it is at the moment?
I quote:
"As Lightning is still early in the design and prototyping stage, there is no firm availability date yet. The developers of Lightning are currently targetting a first general-user release for the middle of 2005."
From what I remember firefox wasn't that wonderful at a similar stage in its dev cyle but look at where it is now its reached its first release.
There is currently a ton of work being done on Sunbird. The backend is being rewritten to allow multiple calendar type providers, and the frontend is being cleaned up to match the new backend. Check out the calendar portion of: Mozilla Wiki for more details.
1. The poster is right. I am following it closely and plenty of things do not work yet. Most importantly - at least as of last month there was no event organizer/owner/user capability even if reading from a server. This makes it completely useless for anything but personal calendaring. In fact if you look at the roadmap this feature is not due in 6 months so there is no way it will be there in 6 months.
2. Even if it did not have the features it would have been useable if it did not screw every single other implementation that has. The biggest falling of Sunbird is that it wipes out all fields it does not understand when processing a calendar record. As a result you cannot use it in groupware mode as anything but a read only client (as of last month).
In fact even korganizer is a few years ahead of Sunbird.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Server: Novell's OpenExchange server
Client: Novell Connector
Try Ctrl+M.
LDAP is not and has never been read-only. LDAP is fully read-write capable, its simply up to the client to support write access and the server to have correct permissions.
Read-write support for LDAP in Mozilla would make me very happy (bookmark storage, contact storage, settings, etc.)
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
The Evolution connector uses OWA (Outlook Web Access) to get it's job done. Outlook Web Access is actually IIS handling WebDaV requests with stylesheets for access so it makes third party access easy. Microsoft's own Entourage connector on OSX does the very same thing along with LDAP for address lookups.
It's not pretty but you can for example on any Exchange 2000+ server mount your mailbox as a WebDAV share.
I've run into a few environments where either OWA is turned off and IMAP/POP are not turned on. Which leaves everyone stuck with a MAPI client. Granted the MAPI object is a *fairly* well documented API however it does limit the client to a Windows platform with MAPI installed. There is some value in it but with MS pulling away from MAPI as well in favor of more flexible HTTP based protocols it's getting long in the tooth.
Very interesting to see other views.
From the experience at my job, shared contacts is not necessary for us at all. Hell half the people don't even use the existing LDAP services.
For us integrating thunderbird and sunbird (while improving the shared calendar via ftp/webDav to be less buggy) would be THE thing.
Being able to add outlook-meeting invites received by email into the calendar would be very nice too.
Why would this be a problem?
You just change your MSI package to the updated one and on next boot/login it'll repair itself and in the process the patch will be applied.
It's no different than other third-party software packages.
wdd
Corporate america is why. When I work I have to be able to send people at diverse locations meeting requests. Outlook lets me connect to their calendar and see when they are free so I do not schedule the meeting at a bad time. It lets me send the request and when people respond it updates everyones schedule to show who has accepted. It let's people suggest an alternative time or location if the original does not work. It then reminds me before the meeting so I can show up on time and be prepared. For people who have to collaborate in large organisations these are vital functions.
Insert Generic Sig Here:
Unfortunately it involves persuading your sysadmin to IMAP on the Exchange server.
IME sysadmins are scared enough of enabling features (esp. on M$ products like Exchange) at the best of times.
Doesn't give you full integration into outlook features like shared calendars either IIRC.
Sorry for replying to my own post!
From Microsofts Website:
"The Exchange Server 2003 user CAL is required for each user gaining access to the server and entitles access rights to both editions of Exchange Server. Each Exchange Server 2003 CAL also includes Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 or Microsoft Entourage X for Mac and permits access from Microsoft Office Outlook Web Access, Outlook Mobile Access, Exchange Server ActiveSync, or any standard Internet-messaging client."
"Look! There! Evil, pure and simple from the Eighth Dimension!" --Buckaroo Banzai
Ximian Evolution should be considered the Outlook killer.
From the Tools menu, select 'Read Mail'. This will launch your default email client - and thus, Thunderbird, if you've set it as default. Couldn't be easier'n that.
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
Maybe it can't crash the system, but sometimes the system can be rendered almost entirely useless. Yesterday, one user app crashed on me, and I couldn't start any new app. I tried everything, but even task manager wouldn't come up. Had to cut power to the system. It was fine with a reboot, but that doesn't seem much better than an outright system crash to me.
Sometimes, Outlook invitations are sent using vCalendar (or iCalendar, I forget which) format, which is an open standard. When they are, any open source program can read them and parse them easily. Other times, they are sent using TNEF in those pesky WINMAIL.DAT files that a program will have to decode before being able to parse the invitation. There is supposedly an Outlook setting to say "Send invitations across the Internet in iCalendar format," but that doesn't seem to have an effect on invitations sent within a company.
Evolution is the only open source program that can process all Outlook invitations correctly, and it did that as of version 1.0 (years ago). It's under a different license than Mozilla (GPL vs. MPL) so I wonder if the code can ever be reused.
For more information, click here.
Indeed, Sunbird has yet to release its 0.2 version, and has never claimed to be a complete piece of software. The developer resources applied to Sunbird and the Mozilla calendaring components in general have grown materially over the last months, during which we've seen important refactoring work to support multiple calendar protocols, rearchitecture of the UI to handle async networking, implementation of initial CalDAV support, improvements in several pieces of the UI (including, you'll be glad to hear, a rationalization of the menu system), and many other smaller fixes. Attachments, attendee management, a sqlite-based local store for improved performance; I could go on, but it's more interesting to read the checkin logs for yourself, I assure you.
Now, as the Wiki indicates -- would that you could get to it! -- competition with Outlook is not a primary goal of Lightning at this point. To do calendaring in the year 2004 requires that you compete with Outlook in some sense, because they really own that market pretty completely, but knocking off their feature set isn't what we're after here. A lot of people have been asking for Sunbird's calendar capabilities (and more) to be integrated more tightly into the Thunderbird mail interface, and that's what Lightning is all about.
I believe that by the summer of 2005 the Lightning project will have developed software that is useful and interesting to a large enough number of people to warrant releasing it. Do I believe that people will abandon Outlook en masse for Lightning in its first release? Seems unlikely. Do I think that there are some users of Outlook who might rather use Thunderbird+Lightning at that point? I'm pretty sure there are.
Exchange interoperability is obviously a hot topic, and rightly so; IMO it was one of the most significant features of Evolution, and one that we're grateful Novell saw fit to release as open source after the acquisition of Ximian. The new protocol architecture we've been designing and implementing over the last few months should accomodate an exchange-protocol plugin, at least on the calendar side, though nobody has yet stepped up to write it. I have reason to believe that a serious contribution of such a plugin, no doubt based on lessons learned from the Evolution connector's source, would be very warmly received into the calendar tree, and featured prominently in Lightning.
I wish I had a local copy of the wiki's Q&A so that I could post it here, but, alas, I do not.
Mike
Despite the name, "OpenExchange" is not an implementation/emulation of the MS-Exchange RPC service. It's just a lower-end groupware server with a borderline trademark-infringing name.
Thunderbird's palm-sync extension works well for many people, though not for all, and I know that several Mozilla calendar developers are interested in synchronization. A fair bit of time during the recent architecture discussions was spent on making sure that we could fit a good sync model -- including transparent offline support, etc. -- into the new calendar system, and I think we've done a decent job of that.
Mike
Having worked with Outlook in both large and small offices, I can tell you that it will take more than shared mail/contacts/calendars to bring down Outlook.
/documentation for people to use.
Here is my list of features that would be needed for a true Outlook killer:
1. Shared mail store
2. Shared calendaring
3. Shared contacts
4. Shared Tasks / To Do lists
5. Journal / History
6. Scripting / Database intergration
7. Third Parts Add-ons
1 - 4 have been widely discussed and I will leave them alone.
5 - This feature is widely used by small offices. The ability to track what documents you worked on, and what clients they go with is importiant for many Outlook users
6 - Outlook is used for far more than what the default comes with. Buisnesses tie it in as a front end with every every database app you can think of. To really become an Outlook killer, we would need to have all the right hooks in place to allow for this, as well as a mess load of examples
7 - Third party support. Do you have any idea how many third party add-ons are in use, and how much these are relied on by buisnesses? It is not trivial. My dentist uses one such plug in for his billing, and another plug in that has an automated voice that calls people with a custom reminder (for each person it calls) about their apointment the next day. I know a lawyer that uses one plug in for billing, another plug in for conflict checking, and another plug in that generates common pleadings. Another lawyer I know uses an Outlook plugins to manage just about every part of his real estate law practice - including filing electronic records with the court. These are just a few examples.