Mozilla Sunbird 0.5 Released

linux pickle writes "Mozilla has released version 0.5 of Sunbird, its calendar app. New features in this release include numerous stability and usage improvements, Google Calendar synchronization support, and much improved printing support. Check out the release notes or grab a copy."

Re:My god this is groundbreaking news

[moderatorrater]

Umm, I don't know who modded the parent troll, but let's be honest, when the story's went for nearly five minutes with nothing but this post, he might actually be right. Just sayin'.

Re:Question

[packetmon]

You should consider SurgeMail. I did away with Exchange for 200+ users using it. To the users it was transparent. They weren't using some of the core functions of Exchange anyway so it was worthless to me. After showing them how things worked, give or take a month and a half of "teach the idjit/PEBKAC (l)users", all was well and it offered the same level of functionality of Exchange. Only a couple thousand dollars cheaper.

Re:Question

[TheRaven64]

What you probably need for an Exchange replacement is something that supports CalDAV. iCal in Leopard will, and it's on the Sunbird roadmap, but I don't think it's in this release. Novell's Hula also supports CalDAV, and might be an option.

Darwin Calendar Server Support?

[amper]

This should be the number one priority for the Sunbird team, if it's not already working (anyone have info on this?). Apple will have iCal 2 out with Mac OS X v10.5 in October, and the iCal Server with Mac OS X Server v10.5. Darwin Calendar Server is available for testing [calendarserver.org] on Mac OS X v10.4, and should also run on any UNIX-like system.

Re:I'm Sorry

[QuantumRiff]

I've actually tested Zimbra in my environment.. Currently we use Eudora for Pop3 and Oracle Calendar. The biggest problem I have with much of the "open source" groupware is that it is Browser only. (zimbra has an offline client that is a resource PIG). For my traveling users, they are not always connected to a network. They still need to be able to lookup when/where their next appointment is. I am planning on moving everyone to Thunderbird/IMAP for email, and would absolutely love to use an opensource calendar app, but an offline client is a must, as well as the ability to control sharing of calendars (central management), delegation, check free/busy time, etc.. If I could find a good, open source calendar server that works with Sunbird/lightning, supported SyncML for PDA's and smartphones, I would be in heaven..

Re:Can sync (sort of) with exchange

[WonderPhil]

Re-posting under my login vs my first AC post:
With this latest announcement of Google Calendar Sync ability this opens up the option of getting my Outlook at work to sync up with my Sunbird at home on my Mac OS X desktop via a couple of hops.

1. Outlook PC at work to ScheduleWorld.com using a Funambol client to extract from Outlook.
2. ScheduleWorld.com to Google Calendar via ScheduleWorld's Google sync ability. You can make step #2 automatic by enabling this in the preferences of your ScheduleWorld (free) account.
3. Sync at home from Google Calendar to Sunbird.

ScheduleWorld has a link to Thunderbird / Sunbird, but I have had limited success with it. If the sync ability is built in to Sunbird, this should be a way smoother approach.

Let the calendar integration begin!

Google Sync is the most important...

[DTemp]

Syncing with google calendar is the most profound new feature to me. Having a calendar stored on one computer is no good to someone who moves between several computers. This is the same reason I use IMAP email, store my sent emails on the IMAP server so I can read even them from whereever I am, and why I DONT use gmail: because it doesnt support IMAP.

Off topic: anyone hear any rumors about gmail supporting IMAP?

Can it now track events, listed by date and time?

[SydShamino]

...because it couldn't when I last used it in March.

Seriously, I tried to organize my SXSW schedule using Sunbird.
1. I added all playings of all movies at SXSW Film that I wanted to see into the SXSW online calendar.
2. Then, I sync'd Sunbird to the online calendar.
3. So that I could make local edits, I exported/reimported the calendar data as a local calendar.
4. I looked at conflicts, etc., and determined which movies I could see on first showing versus catching reruns.
5. When I had it about half done, I saved it and closed Sunbird.
6. The next time I opened Sunbird, I discovered that various events had been shifted by 1 or 4 hours ahead or behind. I could find no way to set the time zone for these events to correspond to my local time zone, and I could not find a pattern between the events that had problems and those that didn't time shift.
7. I tried to manually fix the failures, manually deleting the entries and recreating them locally. It didn't help.
8. ???
9. I gave up and used the crappy SXSW online tool, since I didn't want to sign up for a Google account and those were the only options.

(FYI all online stuff I could find about this related to the DST shift, and told me to install Microsoft patches. All of those patches were already in place before I installed Sunbird or found any of these problems.)

Re:I'm Sorry

[Zonk (troll)]

Nope, tried it at mine. Lightning (a must if you are going to be using Thunderbird in the work place) missing decent native shared calendaring support. This is big stopper. But if you have users that do not require it, go for it. I've rolled it out for our laptop users, i.e users not connected to the exchange server..

Lightning/Sunbird do support shared calendaring. Use either WebDAV or FTP to host it and install it on the client as a remote calendar (whatever it's called). Writing is supported.

If you want to dump exchange, though, go with Scalix. The Community Edition is free for 25 users, though when you get above that it's not cheap. Still, it does everything Exchange does, runs on Linux, provides an excellent web client, full integration with Outlook via a plug-in, and full integration with Evolution via a plug-in.

There are two ways to install it. With an easy to use graphical installer that even a Windows admin can handle, or manually.