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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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Yes... and call it 'Mozilla...' ;-)
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
this is good news but what really should happen first is a suitable replacement for the M$oft backend, opening myself to suggestions here but until you
replace the server we are all at the mercy of Microsoft and their usual patch it to break it mentality.
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
I think modularity is the way to go. Kontact in KDE does it right. Each app (address, email, calendar) are self contained apps that can be run individualy, but Kontact ties them all together ala Outlook/Evolution if you want to use it that way.
keep it modular so you dont have to tinker with the whole to modify a part will stimulate diverse and adaptable solutions .. its like the google/yahoo API theory .. "show us what else we should/could be doing"
Or call it Seamonkey instead, b/c Mozilla Suite isn't supported by the foundation any more, and they only put out security updates.
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/
"Why is an integrated calendar and communications product a "good thing"."
Um... because communications often lead to appointments.
"Why not include a file manager and image editor while we're at it?"
See previous point.
"Derp de derp."
I pitched Outlook for Thunderbird with the Calendar plugin and was happy it migrated all my data from Outlook 2k3 into something a little more standard.
;-)
The only thing I've really missed is a reminder feature for the calendar - I still have to fire up Outlook about once a week to get reminders but I don't use it for email anymore.
Don't know if Sunbird incorporates a reminder feature and couldn't find anything about it on mozilla.org, but I sure hope so. Developers, if you haven't got a reminder feature yet I could really use one
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
-Phone fields that auto-formats to (###) ###-#### or whatever the user needs for his region.
This doesn't make sense to me, on a practical basis. Just because you are in a region, doesn't mean the other person is in the same region, and their phone# is formatted the same way.
And then if the format is based on the contact's region, then you have to set that on every contact. It just seems like a feature request that sounds good until it is created.
In my experience in the business world, Outlook is kept around for its calendar and its integration with other apps. It's not that email in and of itself has to be handled by Outlook.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
How about adding frigging exchange support to the calendaring app.... Yes yes, bowing to the man but there are a LOT of businesses that use exchange. Providing them a good alternative for Win/Linux would be a HUGE. The problem with Kontact and Evolution is that they are pigs. Thunderbird/sunbird are nice because they are simple application footprints.
Why is an integrated calendar and communications product a "good thing".
Perhaps I may want to use communications to let people know about my calendar and changes in it?
This is 2005 after all. For example, I shouldn't have to negotiate a time & place for a meeting with every single person who should be present by telephone. For 10 people, that could easily take a lot of time not to mention the multiple calls to each person.
Instead, I can schedule it for the most convenient time (least impact on their schedules).
This is not a dream, not a dream...we are transmitting from the year 1-9-9-9.
The problem becomes that everyone I know who uses Outlook specifically for the calendar in a corporate sense uses it because it's a *shared* calendar. We use it where I work, and it works really well for what we do (schedule jobs for techs).
In order to take away the corporate calendar market from outlook, they'll need to somehow make it centralized; and then you're just talking evolution.
~will
sig?
What needs to be targetted is not Outlook, but Exchange. Having an Outlook copy/rip-off (Evolution) is useless for real enterprise use without the functionality provided by Exchange, which means integrated/shared calendar/email/directory, and to get that you have to be running a Windows box or two (or twenty) loaded with Exchange in your data center.
Microsoft (IMHO) think Evolution is wonderful. It saves them having to port Outlook to Linux, but still requires the high profit-margin, locke-in, proprietary servers (Evolution) in the background. Why do you think they havn't been screaming "IP Infringement!" about Evolution?
This will be a different animal. It will run on top of standard protocol (IMAP, HTTP/CalDAV) and will cut Windows and Exchange right out of the picture. It will succeed where others - notably Sun, have failed -- Sun has a 100% solid mail server, a (now) solid calendar server, and a (still somewhat funky) address book server, but fails to capture real enterprise customers because they absolutely refuse to build an integrated desktop client.
Microsoft will NOT like this. They can see the writing on the wall for the Office suite, and this is liable to hit their only other really profitable hook into the commercial data center - Exchange.
The problem with Webbased email is if you are working offline, or on a slow connection. I would rather start a send-receive and go to dinner, come back and have all the information available. Also, there are security considerations, do you want your SMIME key stored on some server? In addition, I like having applications on my PC, I don't really like the idea of all my apps on the web.
"My father once told me that respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality." - Muad'Dib
"There aren't any real drop-in replacements for Outlook's functionality in Windows."
Personally, I hope that they're not going to go down the OpenOffice route of "mimic everything in the Microsoft product, including all the bugs, annoyances, and bits of bad design"
I hope they'll try to create something better than Outlook. Something more easy to use (maybe less people will send me meeting requests in an obviously-wrong timezone if it's easier to use). Something with more features (like where's all the notification and subscription options that a calendar should have?)
And hopefully not have all the same bugs (like, why can't I move things to public folders on the web interface? Why can't you search more than one folder at once? Why does it fail to show certain parts of an email? How do you stop it displaying HTML, or defaulting to HTML).
...but it will be worth it. The goal, of course, is standards-based functionality for PIM (Personal Information Management) software. Yes, people really do want a replacement for Outlook, and the open source community would do well to offer complete, end-to-end solutions. Combine the Lightning client with standards-based servers and you've got a good shot at finally getting people to dump Outlook and Exchange.
Here's the thing, though: everyone seems to assume that we need an "Outlook Killer" and an "Exchange Killer." This is, in fact, not true. "One size fits all" only works for Microsoft because Microsoft forces that model. In an ideal world, everyone will select the products that fit them best, and those products will all work together. That means some folks might choose Lightning, some might choose Aethera instead, and they'd still be able to interact with each other's calendars. On the server side, the dozen or so open source groupware servers such as Kolab, OGo, Citadel, and PHPgroupware would all be able to speak common protocols with Lightning and other clients. Users would choose based on other features; for example, one organization might want strong support for forms-based workflow, another might want rich real-time communications, another might want a large selection of third-party plugins. The idea is to allow people to choose their software based on the feature set, rather than by being locked into one choice because, for example, only Exchange supports all the features of Outlook.
It's going to take a lot of cooperation but we'll get there.
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I don't want to disregard the efforts made to bring the port to OSX, but I'm afraid X11 won't cut it for most users (including mine).
Wait... now come on, who ELSE are they targetting? Gotta be MS Outlook users. Nobody uses Oracle Corporate Time.
Actually, we use Oracle Corporate Time, and we like it a lot. While it's not 100% ideal (and I doubt anything really could be) it does support all the major platforms in use here: Windows, Linux, and Mac. The web client is also very nice, and I actually prefer it over the (Motif) native Linux client.
Meeting announcements/invites are sent via email, which makes it a perfect fit for integration with an email package. That said, I would love to integrate my (Thunderbird) email and (Oracle CT) calendaring into one application!
Be careful where you point that "nobody".
Seriously, the Mozilla Calendar project(s) have been stale for years now. That's not because there isn't work going on, but there are way too few developers interested on the thing. Yet the enormous response each announcement gets that speaks of calendar integration for Mozilla should be indication enough that this is a very rewarding project.
So folks, join them.