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."

Comments

Why not

[Adult film producer]

just integrate everything - thunderbird, firefox and sunbird into one big application ?

Re:Why not

[n0-0p]

There is actually an intelligent response to everyone making this same tired joke. The Mozilla Foundation retargeted development on seperate applications to simplify things for most users. With that done, one of the next major steps (2.0 timeframe) is to break all the shared functionality out into XulRunner (currently being actively developed).

Eventually all of the apps (FF, TB, SB) will use XulRunner but still be developed and distributed as seperate applications. This should provide the best of both worlds. It will have the tight integration and lower resource usage of the single suite, but without requiring everyone to deal with the headaches of one big monolithic application.

To anyone interested I'd really advise heading over to the Mozilla wiki and taking a look at what's going.

Critical Bug Fix... or Feature?

[stlhawkeye]

...will make the combined application more attractive to corporate users, although they're not specifically targeting Microsoft Outlook.

...will include fixes for the most important bugs, such as those that cause the loss of data.

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.

Re:New?

[nine-times]

I thought a calendar was already available for Thunderbird as a plugin.

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.

"Integration"

[oGMo]

The roadmap says:

Lightning 0.2

• Better Thunderbird integration
  • email<->task linkage
  • IMIP support
• Improved CalDAV support

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?

Re:New?

[Ixne]

Cool... so now all my friends can schedule my time for me without asking, just like my boss does!

Dammit.

[fahrvergnugen]

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."

Ford and Pontiac?

[Null537]

Sunbird and Thunderbird coming together? Did somebody run a red light?

Re:New?

[nine-times]

It's probably not an "excuse". There aren't any real drop-in replacements for Outlook's functionality in Windows.

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).