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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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Get it? Outlook... Look Out? LOL
I thought a calendar was already available for Thunderbird as a plugin.
Anyway, I only really use web-based email. I have no need for an email client. Will Sunbird still have stand-alone releases?
just integrate everything - thunderbird, firefox and sunbird into one big application ?
Wait... now come on, who ELSE are they targetting? Gotta be MS Outlook users. Nobody uses Oracle Corporate Time. If they want to win over MS users they ought to leave bugs in the software that cause catastrophic data loss. It's what MS users are used to.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
It's about time. Now all they've got to do is make a version of the mail program for my palm pilot/windows mobile device and I can stop using Outlook.
--
RumorsDaily
Coming in 2006: The new Mozilla suite (TM). With Firefox browser, and new calendar featured Thunderbird.
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"
The roadmap says:
My first thought at seeing the article was "integration? I thought the point was to separate them", but this seems to mean "integrate" like "let's make them talk better".
The article on the other hand seems to misunderstand and say "the combined application" and imply they're building one big Thunderbird/Sunbird conglomerate. I don't think this is the case, reading the roadmap. Anyone have more data on this?
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Calendar:Lightning:0.1
From MozillaWiki
This is the current list of things to do for 0.1, in priority order:
* place all precautionary / compatibility notices
* blog about nightlies; link to from wiki
* fix all major dataloss bugs
* figure out versioning / compatibility / build plan
* fix dogfood bugs
* forums, calendar blog post about nightlies
* announce to mozillazine
* fix all known dataloss bugs
* fix remaining blockers
* release 0.1rc1
What exactly is a "dogfood bug," in this context?
Why is an integrated calendar and communications product a "good thing".
Why not include a file manager and image editor while we're at it?
I read
The one question you would have to ask would it support an ecxhange server?
If not... Can they pull of "Exchange-like" behavior with calenders and meetings on a pop server?
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
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...The "patch it to break it" could just as easily be applied to the client end. The fact is, the client end is extremely important-- large businesses are slower in migrating servers to new software than to experiment with client-side solutions. Outlook and Exchange reenforce each other. You can't use all of Outlook's features with Exchange, and Outlook doesn't work well with anything else.
It'd be easier to make a new server-end system if you already have a client in place which will connect to it.
Just when I thought we'd finally standardized on a naming convention that nobody could easily mis-spell, now I'm going to have to put up with a hojillion references to "lightening."
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
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
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
Sunbird and Thunderbird coming together? Did somebody run a red light?
-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.
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.
...and a web content composer, and maybe a crappy IRC client to boot.
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.
...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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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.
Mozilla was a contraction of "Mosaic Killer"
So why not Attilla
"Outlook Killer"
Besides, Attilla sounds like it would kick #$%
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
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.
Tell me, what do you miss from Thunderbird ?
I use thunderbird exclusively and get around 200 emails a day, as an imap client it suits my needs down to the ground. What functionality of Outlook 2003 do you miss ?