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Mozilla Lightning Plans to Unify Mail & Calendar
Neil writes "The Mozilla Foundation has published an initial roadmap for 'Lightning', the project to integrate its calendar application Sunbird with its email application Thunderbird."
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It is, and yet Thunderbird still isn't a suitable replacement for Outlook in corporate environments. From what I understand, Lightning aims to fix that.
An integration will be most welcome. Though too late to make any big difference here, I still use Mozilla myself and would be happy not to have to decode VCS files in my head.
Rich
The slashdot story is a little misleading... As you can see on this wiki here Lightning is an extension for thunderbird but very tightly integrated.
And I quote:
Actually, just read the faq I linked..."dogfood bugs" are usability issues, according to:
http://www.mozilla.org/editor/dogfood.html
Um, if the Mozilla crew can put together a mail + calendar app that has the usability of Firefox, I'd switch to it. I've never used Outlook, but I do want to ditch my crappy Palm Desktop software.
When you look at the state of the world, how can you not become a radical, liberal anarchist?
I believe it's from the term 'eating their own dogfood' which means using the tool you're developing. ie, during the build of NT, Dave Cutler made the developers use the beta builds of NT, and it was termed 'eating their own dogfood'.
This probably means the devs are using the product and mean to fix the bugs they've logged.
Same with the Apple mail/ical/address book suite on the Mac. I think keeping them seperate is the way to go, as it gives the user the choice to use what they want.
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Any bug that prevents them from using the project internally as their official corporate calendar app.
Thunderbird is doing what it always does. Keep a lightweight email client around, but for those who want/need calander, they can install an extension to give it to them. A lot of good ideas show up in this.
Futher, this is not a Mozilla Foundation annoucement.
A good wiki page on it all is here: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Calendar:Lightning
There is actually an intelligent response to everyone making this same tired joke. The Mozilla Foundation retargeted development on seperate applications to simplify things for most users. With that done, one of the next major steps (2.0 timeframe) is to break all the shared functionality out into XulRunner (currently being actively developed).
Eventually all of the apps (FF, TB, SB) will use XulRunner but still be developed and distributed as seperate applications. This should provide the best of both worlds. It will have the tight integration and lower resource usage of the single suite, but without requiring everyone to deal with the headaches of one big monolithic application.
To anyone interested I'd really advise heading over to the Mozilla wiki and taking a look at what's going.
What's even worse is the situation on the Mac side. Microsoft doesn't even make a real OSX Exchange client. There's Outlook 2001, which only runs in OS9/Classic, and then there's Entourage, which is buggy, unstable, doesn't work properly, and generally stinks. Otherwise, you're stuck with webmail or a normal IMAP client.
In short, there is not a single OSX application that properly supports Exchange. Public folders are near useless. You can't share mailboxes, calendars, contacts, etc. Meeting requests don't even work properly.
On linux, at least you have Evolution. Evolution is a pretty good Outlook replacement, but the Windows port isn't done, and Novell hasn't announced any plans for an OSX version (as far as I know).
No. Exchange uses calendaring uses RPC/MAPI or WebDAV.
If not... Can they pull of "Exchange-like" behavior with calenders and meetings on a pop server?
No. They use CalDAV for calendar sharing.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
Yes, Sunbird is a standalone calendaring application and has "alarms" instead of "reminders" but they do exactly the same thing. I also switched from Outlook to Thunderbird about a year ago, and the only problem I had was getting the HTML eMail exported from Outlook. It would always re-import as plain text, with all the HTML code as text.
It usually is not very attractive to switch to a competing app that interfaces with systems like Exchange, Windows Terminal Server, Citrix, etc.
This is because you need a "client access license" to use such systems. So, even when you are not using Outlook you still have to pay. In some cases, you are even "forced" to buy the complete product.
(e.g. to use Terminal Server you need a Windows license for your workstation. Fine when it already runs Windows, but when it is running a competing system you have to buy that license)
This takes one of the incentives away from switching to a competing environment.
To cater for this, you have to develop a competing Exchange server as well (this has already been done, of course).
At that moment, it may be more attractive to develop according to an open standard.
I guess no one on the entire Mozilla Calendar team or the user community, for that matter, has thought of that right? :)
Not trying to give you a hard time, but what you're asking for would be very, very, difficult. You would essentially have to reverse engineer Microsoft's MAPI over RPC protocol. Many have tried, none have succeeded. Or, if you only support newer versions of Exchange with OWA turned on, use Microsoft's WebDAV based calendar schema built on Exchange WebAccess, like Evolution does.
Mozilla is doing the best they could I think, they're basing their app on a protocol on the IETF standards track http://ietfreport.isoc.org/idref/draft-dusseault-c aldav/
If an organization wants to get rid of Exchange entirely, they then can give their Outlook users a MAPI plugin that supports CalDAV. We're an opensource plugin at OpenConnector.org.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
If you've ever seen Sunbird, then you would know that it allows you to configure the calendar to display however you want. And "a more logical order" would really be ISO 8601 (YYYY-MM-DD) instead of anything that Britain or the United States would fight over.
Work on the operating system that most people have to use at work.
Download SP2 for Office 2004 and Entourage becomes a halfway decent Exchange client. Public folders work now.i ce2004sp2
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/default.aspx?pid=off
You would think so. But it doesn't seem to work that way.
.ics calendar attachments into the calendar. Automatic detection of scheduling requests would be even better.
.ics file to your hard drive and then use the "import" command to import the event.
.ics detection or drag/drop is high on the to-do list. I still find Sunbird useful, and I'm using it now. I just don't see that there is any level of actual email/calendar integration yet.
.ics attachments myself, I can't think of the plugin as getting me much.
I installed the plugin not long ago, with the expectation that at MINIMUM, you would be able to drag & drop
It doesn't appear to do even that. As far as I could see, the only way to get scheduling requests into the calendar (regardless of whether you use Sunbird or the Thunderbird plugin) is to save the
Therefore, as far as I can tell, the only advantage to using the Thunderbird plugin at this time, is that it sits in the Thunderbird directory instead of its own directory. And that you open it as a switch to the thunderbird command, instead of as a separate command. Whoop-dee-doo. Not to say that I don't understand that this is a work-in-progress, I am aware of that. I'm sure that
I would love to be wrong about this by the way. Maybe somebody will reply to this and tell me that the plugin has lots of very useful bits - but as long as I have to manage my
Pix
don't mess with those geekgrrls
When will it have Palm/PocketPC/PDA support? Thats the big thing keeping me from switching from Palm Desktop and/or Outlook.
Evolution port for OSX is already in progress according to Novell5 -March/msg00592.htmlt ml
p m ps-along-on-windows-and.html
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/evolution-list/200
working with fink
http://primates.ximian.com/~aaron/doing/evo-osx.h
While Tor Lillqvist and few others works on Windows port
http://evolution-win32.sourceforge.net/newsrss.ph
screenshots
http://tml-blog.blogspot.com/2005/06/evolution-li
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Microsoft has spent the last year working almost solely on improving Entourage to work better with Exchange. Last week they released Office 2004 Service Pack 2, which contains improvements to everything you've noted as being problems: Public folder support; sharing of mailboxes, calendars, contacts; complete global address list support; ability to do delegation... and so on and so forth. More information on MS's website.
My guess would be because Microsoft bought a company that created an Outlook plugin called LookOut. It was an indexer that let you search your emails, documents, etc for different topics and even went so far as to search links for references.
it works decently well when it isn't broken
Until PDA/phone manufacturers support something other than Outlook, or Mozilla "speaks" Outlook, this is a showstopper for many.
While I agree that mobile devices need to sync. I'd rather see them syncing with the server. That could be accomplished with something like Sync4J, which speaks in a standards-compliant way (wherever possible) to the server. That way you don't have to have your desktop running (or connected) in order to sync your mobile device.
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