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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!
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.
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
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.
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.
...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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