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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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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.
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.
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.
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
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
"dogfood bugs" are usability issues, according to:
http://www.mozilla.org/editor/dogfood.html
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.
Cool... so now all my friends can schedule my time for me without asking, just like my boss does!
"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."
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.
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
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?
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'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).
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
Even then, Exchange support is pretty well crap. They've just cobbled together the IMAP support and LDAP support so that you can set them both up with one "Account settings" wizard. Gee, thanks. I still have to manually clear out my keychain every now and then to keep Entourage from locking my Windows account.
And don't get me started on Palm. So much potential, they even bought out Be, and they haven't done jack. Their new models bump up the RAM a little. Wowwie! I with they'd get a clue, toss the Hotsync method of transferring files, get rid of their Palm Desktop software (like you said), support OSX properly, and make a useful product for once. Open-source BeOS while you're at it. Instead it looks like they're just going to move to Windows Mobile and compete directly with Axims and iPaqs.
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
...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.