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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
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
"dogfood bugs" are usability issues, according to:
http://www.mozilla.org/editor/dogfood.html
Cool... so now all my friends can schedule my time for me without asking, just like my boss does!
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).
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.
...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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