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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/
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.
...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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