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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.
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?
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/
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)
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
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.
Ximian Evolution should be considered the Outlook killer.
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