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Mozilla The Internet Communications IT

Mozilla Lightning Plans to Unify Mail & Calendar 256

Posted by CmdrTaco from the here's-hoping-it-works-out dept.
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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Mozilla Lightning Plans to Unify Mail & Calendar More

Mozilla Lightning Plans to Unify Mail & Calendar

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  • why don't they call it "Look Out" (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Get it? Outlook... Look Out? LOL
    • My guess would be because Microsoft bought a company that created an Outlook plugin called LookOut. It was an indexer that let you search your emails, documents, etc for different topics and even went so far as to search links for references.
      it works decently well when it isn't broken
    • Mozilla was a contraction of "Mosaic Killer"

      So why not Attilla
      "Outlook Killer"

      Besides, Attilla sounds like it would kick #$%

  • New? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Adelbert ( 873575 ) on Tuesday September 27, 2005 @01:05PM (#13659472) Journal
    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?

    • Re:New? (Score:5, Informative)

      by nine-times ( 778537 ) <nine.times@gmail.com> on Tuesday September 27, 2005 @01:07PM (#13659500) Homepage
      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.

      • Re:New? (Score:5, Funny)

        by Ixne ( 599904 ) on Tuesday September 27, 2005 @01:17PM (#13659611)
        Cool... so now all my friends can schedule my time for me without asking, just like my boss does!

        • I don't think the Thunderbird plugin does much yet (Score:4, Informative)

          by sillypixie ( 696077 ) on Tuesday September 27, 2005 @02:27PM (#13660227) Journal
          You would think so. But it doesn't seem to work that way.

          I installed the plugin not long ago, with the expectation that at MINIMUM, you would be able to drag & drop .ics calendar attachments into the calendar. Automatic detection of scheduling requests would be even better.

          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 .ics file to your hard drive and then use the "import" command to import the event.

          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 .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.

          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 .ics attachments myself, I can't think of the plugin as getting me much.

          Pix

      • Are they adding a Journal as well? That & the calendar are the only reason Thunderbird isn't used by *everyone* here as opposed to just the people who can get by without them.

        Jaysyn
      • Well first, in general, companies don't want to have to get plug-ins...they want the stuff to work the way they want it to out of hte box. Outlook has a lot of rich features...it is a good product. I use tasks to manage projects, I use calander for appointments (and can be used for projects). Thunderbird needs the same features as Outlook to get a foothold. But then you get to other things...how will Thunderbird (in it's upgraded state) act with all of my corporate programs such as MS Web Outlook, Solom
      • The problem is that even Lightning will not be a drop-in replacement for Outlook. To use it, departments will have to at least configure their Exchange servers to recognize the IMAP protocol, and even with that change I don't think Outlook and Lightning scheduling will interoperate.

        The only way Lightning can replace Outlook is for everyone in the entire department to completely switch from one to the other. Many IT people are going to see that as too risky, or at least too much work for the reward, and no

    • Re:New? (Score:2)

      by Ikn ( 712788 )
      I think they intend to do it that way, but they don't seem to be really focusing on Sunbird, at least on its own, right now. At least not intently, I haven't seen a major update for it in ages; it still works for what I need it to work for, so I don't mind. (yet)

    • Re:New? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by garns ( 318370 )
      The problem with Webbased email is if you are working offline, or on a slow connection. I would rather start a send-receive and go to dinner, come back and have all the information available. Also, there are security considerations, do you want your SMIME key stored on some server? In addition, I like having applications on my PC, I don't really like the idea of all my apps on the web.

  • Why not (Score:5, Funny)

    by Adult film producer ( 866485 ) <van@i2pmail.org> on Tuesday September 27, 2005 @01:05PM (#13659476)
    just integrate everything - thunderbird, firefox and sunbird into one big application ?

    • Re:Why not (Score:4, Insightful)

      by GungaDan ( 195739 ) on Tuesday September 27, 2005 @01:06PM (#13659486) Homepage
      Yes... and call it 'Mozilla...' ;-)

    • Re:Why not (Score:5, Informative)

      by n0-0p ( 325773 ) on Tuesday September 27, 2005 @01:35PM (#13659755)
      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.

      • Re:Why not (Score:4, Interesting)

        by phoenix_rizzen ( 256998 ) on Tuesday September 27, 2005 @02:25PM (#13660209)
        And another project takes a page out of the KDE development book. :) This is exactly the process taken by the Kontact project. A container application that integrates multiple separate applications into a cohesive whole. You can run the individual apps (KMail, KAddressbook, KNotes, Akregator, Todo, Journal, KNode, etc) as separate applications, or you can run Kontact which provides a nice sidebar with links to each component, and gives you a single window for everything.

        Best of both worlds: those that want individual apps can use them as such, and those that like the "everything under the sun integrated together" can use it as such.

  • Critical Bug Fix... or Feature? (Score:5, Funny)

    by stlhawkeye ( 868951 ) on Tuesday September 27, 2005 @01:06PM (#13659484) Homepage Journal
    ...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:Critical Bug Fix... or Feature? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Richy_T ( 111409 ) on Tuesday September 27, 2005 @01:09PM (#13659519) Homepage
      Absolutely. Catastrophic data loss is the only thing that keeps our users from filling up their hard-drives.
    • Wait... now come on, who ELSE are they targetting? Gotta be MS Outlook users.

      I'd say why waste effort then. Move that effort into the Evolution port to win32 (if it exists, I think it does) and concentrate on how to get a pst file into Evolution easily. That's how you'll get Outlook users to move.
      • It isn't Outlook that needs to be targetted, its the Exchange server sitting behind it. Evolution is no real help if you still have to have a Windows box running Exchange sitting in the data center - and thats exactly what you need if you want fully functional and integrated mail/calendaring/directory suitable for enterprise use.

    • Re:Critical Bug Fix... or Feature? (Score:4, Informative)

      by xgamer04 ( 248962 ) <xgamer04@NosPam.yahoo.com> on Tuesday September 27, 2005 @01:17PM (#13659605)
      Um, if the Mozilla crew can put together a mail + calendar app that has the usability of Firefox, I'd switch to it. I've never used Outlook, but I do want to ditch my crappy Palm Desktop software.
      • The problem becomes that everyone I know who uses Outlook specifically for the calendar in a corporate sense uses it because it's a *shared* calendar. We use it where I work, and it works really well for what we do (schedule jobs for techs).

        In order to take away the corporate calendar market from outlook, they'll need to somehow make it centralized; and then you're just talking evolution.

        ~will

        • Re:Critical Bug Fix... or Feature? (Score:4, Insightful)

          by PhilipPeake ( 711883 ) on Tuesday September 27, 2005 @02:12PM (#13660102)
          Evolution is not an answer.

          What needs to be targetted is not Outlook, but Exchange. Having an Outlook copy/rip-off (Evolution) is useless for real enterprise use without the functionality provided by Exchange, which means integrated/shared calendar/email/directory, and to get that you have to be running a Windows box or two (or twenty) loaded with Exchange in your data center.

          Microsoft (IMHO) think Evolution is wonderful. It saves them having to port Outlook to Linux, but still requires the high profit-margin, locke-in, proprietary servers (Evolution) in the background. Why do you think they havn't been screaming "IP Infringement!" about Evolution?

          This will be a different animal. It will run on top of standard protocol (IMAP, HTTP/CalDAV) and will cut Windows and Exchange right out of the picture. It will succeed where others - notably Sun, have failed -- Sun has a 100% solid mail server, a (now) solid calendar server, and a (still somewhat funky) address book server, but fails to capture real enterprise customers because they absolutely refuse to build an integrated desktop client.

          Microsoft will NOT like this. They can see the writing on the wall for the Office suite, and this is liable to hit their only other really profitable hook into the commercial data center - Exchange.

          • I don't know about that, MS-Office (which Outlook is part of) is one of the major cash cow for Microsoft, if not the biggest. I wouldn't be so sure that MS would be willing to sacrifice Outlook as long as they get to keep Exchange. I think the other way around may be more likely.
    • We use Oracle Calendar (formerly Steltor CorporateTime, formerly CS&T, formerly Netscape Calendar) at the University I work for. I'd love to see it integrated with Thunderbird, which is our e-mail client of choice, since it's easy to support on all platforms.

    • Wait... now come on, who ELSE are they targetting? Gotta be MS Outlook users. Nobody uses Oracle Corporate Time.

      Actually, we use Oracle Corporate Time, and we like it a lot. While it's not 100% ideal (and I doubt anything really could be) it does support all the major platforms in use here: Windows, Linux, and Mac. The web client is also very nice, and I actually prefer it over the (Motif) native Linux client.

      Meeting announcements/invites are sent via email, which makes it a perfect fit for integra

  • Thank god (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DoorFrame ( 22108 ) on Tuesday September 27, 2005 @01:07PM (#13659493) Homepage
    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.

  • going to a new Mozilla suite? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 27, 2005 @01:07PM (#13659499)
    Coming in 2006: The new Mozilla suite (TM). With Firefox browser, and new calendar featured Thunderbird.

  • Modular (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Helios1182 ( 629010 ) on Tuesday September 27, 2005 @01:07PM (#13659501)
    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.

    • Re:Modular (Score:3, Informative)

      by wtmcgee ( 113309 )
      Same with the Apple mail/ical/address book suite on the Mac. I think keeping them seperate is the way to go, as it gives the user the choice to use what they want.

      • Re:Modular (Score:3, Insightful)

        by TheRaven64 ( 641858 )
        Apple's Address Book is a really good example. The Address Book framework back-end is integrated into the system[1]. The Address Book app, the Address Book dashboard widget, and a number of third party address book apps are all wrappers around this. This is hugely useful, since the data is accessible from anywhere, even if you decide never to use Address Book.app.

        [1] No trolls, it doesn't run in kernel-space. It is, however, available to all app developers.

        • I also think that is great. I think they have to be careful to not cross that line and integrate it too much into the system, but as it stands, it's wonderful to have address book functionality in iChat or Adium (putting your contacts' IM address in address book will have their 'real' name show up in your chat app, if you so choose), amongst other things. Any app can take advantage of the info put in there, and that's a good thing (TM).
  • Why would they change from the current model? It's really nice having the option to use it standalone, as a Thunderbird dropin, or as a Firebird dropin. Forcing me to go through Thunderbird would be really irritating.

    • The slashdot story is a little misleading... As you can see on this wiki here [mozilla.org] Lightning is an extension for thunderbird but very tightly integrated.

      And I quote:

      "Lightning" is simply a project code name to keep from having to type or say "Thunderbird extension for tightly-integrated calendar functionality" all the time.
      Actually, just read the faq I linked...

  • plugins (Score:2, Insightful)

    by hatch815 ( 917921 )
    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"

  • "Integration" (Score:5, Interesting)

    by oGMo ( 379 ) on Tuesday September 27, 2005 @01:11PM (#13659544)

    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?

  • Dogfood? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by TheLoneIguana ( 126589 )
    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 nightlie

  • Why? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by pmike_bauer ( 763028 )
    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?

    • Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Tuesday September 27, 2005 @01:20PM (#13659631) Homepage Journal
      "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.

      • And equally, because it's handy to have appointments automatically generate communications, e.g., to invite people to a meeting, log their reply, confirm with everyone that the meeting will go ahead once you've had all the replies back, and then issue a reminder automatically n minutes before the start time.

        The fact that most of the guys here can do this sort of stuff (using Outlook/Exchange) and I can't (using TBird) means I can't actually book any of the company rooms for meetings, and other equally daf

    • Re:Why? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by HD Webdev ( 247266 )
      Why is an integrated calendar and communications product a "good thing".

      Perhaps I may want to use communications to let people know about my calendar and changes in it?

      This is 2005 after all. For example, I shouldn't have to negotiate a time & place for a meeting with every single person who should be present by telephone. For 10 people, that could easily take a lot of time not to mention the multiple calls to each person.

      Instead, I can schedule it for the most convenient time (least impact

    • Re:Why? (Score:3, Funny)

      by mshiltonj ( 220311 )
      Why not include a file manager and image editor while we're at it?

      Good point. I'll add it to the list. Thanks.

  • Emulating Outlook 2003? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by vertinox ( 846076 ) on Tuesday September 27, 2005 @01:14PM (#13659579)
    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?
    • Not on POP. POP is the friggin' devil (and doesn't lend itself to anything but downloading - not uploading). IMAP, probably.
    • I get the impression that the Lightning extension is one step of many which will enable Thunderbird to be built up into a heavyweight groupware client for those who need it.

      (Add redundant comment, as already stated above - like KDE Kontact which uses elements of different KDE apps to build a complete application, Mozilla Lightning will use elements of Thunderbird and Sunbird/Moz.Calendar to make an email-and-scheduling app)

      Obviously the nature of POP (Post Office Protocol - mail stays on server waitin

    • Re:Emulating Outlook 2003? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Kunta Kinte ( 323399 ) on Tuesday September 27, 2005 @01:47PM (#13659880) Journal
      The one question you would have to ask would it support an ecxhange server?

      No. Exchange uses calendaring uses RPC/MAPI or WebDAV.

      If not... Can they pull of "Exchange-like" behavior with calenders and meetings on a pop server?

      No. They use CalDAV [isoc.org] for calendar sharing.

    • I think you have to bear in mind that Sunbird is a very immature product itself, and we're talking about 0.1 versions here. The dev team for Sunbird, unfortunately, seem to be almost non-existent, and have chosen to prioritise things like CalDAV. They're not, according to the last roadmap I looked at (a few weeks ago now, so check yourself if it matters to you) giving any particular time to Exchange compatibility at all. Which is a shame, because I bet the latter would be useful to far more people in practi

  • I've asked for it before:
    -Phone fields that auto-formats to (###) ###-#### or whatever the user needs for his region.
    -ability to print multiple contacts per page(I'm talking about 10 per page in 4 columns, not 1 or 2 per page)

    And yes I'm a OLK user but one that would love to migrate. I cringe everytime I launch it thinking it will get a poison-pill email.
    • -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 little centrist-world called North america this would work.
        For somebody with many out-of-country contacts this, however, could be a pain.
        The solution is to have TB or Lightning look at the country field in the contact and "know" what format that country uses.

        Right now olk just looks up the settings in the computer and *assumes* that most/all contacts will be in the same region.
    • -Phone fields that auto-formats to (###) ###-#### or whatever the user needs for his region.
      -ability to print multiple contacts per page(I'm talking about 10 per page in 4 columns, not 1 or 2 per page)

      1) Sure, why not. But then again, you might want to make this a regional setting (adaptable if you are overseas, etc).
      2) Why not? It'd be neat to have a stylesheet layout engine for contacts so you could print business cards and carry them around in your wallet, as well as having them electronically in yo

  • Thunderbird (Score:4, Informative)

    by Richy_T ( 111409 ) on Tuesday September 27, 2005 @01:16PM (#13659599) Homepage
    The biggest show-stopper for Thunderbird for me was that people would send me little vcs notifications from Outlook and they would just sit in my mozilla inbox as weird looking files rather than get inserted into the calendar. You could import them manually but it was a hassle. I went searching for a solutions but the mozilla people would point their fingers at the thunderbird and the thunderbird people would point their fingers at mozilla and I don't have time to do the job myself so when I was asked if there was an alternative to Outlook... (Calendering is one of the supreme needs of the suits).

    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

    • I am currently in an MS-centric work environment and I experienced the same problem. I found it infuriating to receive these meeting invitations and not even have the attachment show up as an attachment I could save. What I wound up doing was writing a dead simple awk script to extract the VCS attachment. It's still a multistep process:

      1. in Thunderbird, save email somewhere handy as $email
      2. in a shell (cygwin, on Windows), run extract_ics.awk $email > $ical
      3. in Sunbird/calendar extension, import $ical and

  • Dammit. (Score:5, Funny)

    by fahrvergnugen ( 228539 ) <fahrvNO@SPAMhotmail.com> on Tuesday September 27, 2005 @01:20PM (#13659637) Homepage
    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."

  • Article title misleading (Score:5, Informative)

    by augustz ( 18082 ) on Tuesday September 27, 2005 @01:21PM (#13659642)
    Lightning is the working project name for an extension to tightly integrate calendar functionality (scheduling, tasks, etc.) into Thunderbird.

    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.

    Q. Will this be Mozilla Lightning(TM)? Is this an official Mozilla Foundation product?
    A. "Lightning" is simply a project code name to keep from having to type or say "Thunderbird extension for tightly-integrated calendar functionality" all the time. The Mozilla Foundation has not yet announced any plans to add Lightning to its set of supported products under any name; indeed, such an announcement would be premature, as the exact composition of Lightning is still very much under discussion.


    A good wiki page on it all is here: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Calendar:Lightning [mozilla.org]

  • reminder function, please! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pointbeing ( 701902 ) on Tuesday September 27, 2005 @01:21PM (#13659645)
    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 ;-)
    • Yes, Sunbird is a standalone calendaring application and has "alarms" instead of "reminders" but they do exactly the same thing. I also switched from Outlook to Thunderbird about a year ago, and the only problem I had was getting the HTML eMail exported from Outlook. It would always re-import as plain text, with all the HTML code as text.

  • Ford and Pontiac? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Null537 ( 772236 ) on Tuesday September 27, 2005 @01:24PM (#13659670)
    Sunbird and Thunderbird coming together? Did somebody run a red light?

  • Calendar Integration a Good Idea (Score:4, Insightful)

    by geoffrobinson ( 109879 ) on Tuesday September 27, 2005 @01:28PM (#13659701) Homepage
    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.
  • 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.
    • It usually is not very attractive to switch to a competing app that interfaces with systems like Exchange, Windows Terminal Server, Citrix, etc.
      This is because you need a "client access license" to use such systems. So, even when you are not using Outlook you still have to pay. In some cases, you are even "forced" to buy the complete product.
      (e.g. to use Terminal Server you need a Windows license for your workstation. Fine when it already runs Windows, but when it is running a competing system you have t

    • Do you want a 'friggin' pony with that?... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Kunta Kinte ( 323399 ) on Tuesday September 27, 2005 @02:01PM (#13660000) Journal
      How about adding frigging exchange support to the calendaring app....

      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/ [isoc.org] 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 [openconnector.org].

  • I was actually talking about this with my friend last night. If Thunderbird gets a quality calander (task, calander, etc) and contact list it will SMOKE Outlook. First MS Outlook doesn't (as far as I have been able to figure it out) support multiple mailboxes, where they go into different directories and are treated differently (sort rules do not count). Thunderbird handles this well.
    I use (on my home computer) Outlook for work (required) and Thunderbird to handle my four different e-mail accounts. V

  • Now they just need to integrate the web browser... (Score:3, Funny)

    by TheLittleJetson ( 669035 ) on Tuesday September 27, 2005 @02:21PM (#13660180)
    ...and a web content composer, and maybe a crappy IRC client to boot.
  • It sounds like Lightning is a TB extension, while Sunbird [mozilla.org] is a standalone program. What are the pros and cons for each?

  • This will take a long time... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by IGnatius T Foobar ( 4328 ) on Tuesday September 27, 2005 @03:09PM (#13660572) Homepage Journal
    ...but it will be worth it. The goal, of course, is standards-based [groupdav.org] 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 [citadel.org] 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 [thekompany.com] 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 [kolab.org], OGo [opengroupware.org], Citadel [citadel.org], and PHPgroupware [phpgroupware.org] 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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