Thunderbird to Get Calendar Add-in

By Ed Oswald | Published September 28, 2005, 12:51 PM

It looks as if Mozilla developers are attempting to make their Thunderbird e-mail client more competitive with Microsoft's Outlook. A roadmap to integrate a calendar application with Thunderbird was posted recently, which details the project known as "Lightning."

The group hopes to have basic functionality ready for release in November. Better Thunderbird integration, e-mail and task linkage, as well as CalDAV support are goals of the second revision, for which no timetable was given. Successive releases of Lightning will add localization support, device synchronization and cached offline calendar support.

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Anyone try the nightly of Lightning? It's compatible with Thunderbird v1.5 Beta 1 -- and it's fantastic! Only issue I have is that it didn't import my previous Moz Calendar plug-in dates...

http://ftp.mozilla.org/p...atest-trunk/windows-xpi/

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anything would be better than outlook which has really good features, but it is a heavy load on computer resources.

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Pardon me if I don't hold my breath.

From an article on Betanews (12/23/2004):

The Mozilla foundation has unveiled a new project called "Lightning" that will be tightly integrated into Mozilla's new Thunderbird e-mail client and sharpen the client's elbows against rival Microsoft's Outlook software. With Lightning, Thunderbird will have user features that may compete with Microsoft in the enterprise and thwart the software giant's size advantage by being free of cost.

Mozilla developer Mike Shaver announced the project saying, "The first Lightning release is planned for the middle of 2005."

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Long way to go....MS has this market wrapped, like it or not OUTLOOK is top of the line software.

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Outlook 2003 is the first version I have ever liked. All others were, frankly, bad! 2003 borrowed heavily from Lotus Notes.

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Good news. Sunbird is great but it seems it can only alert you by sending you an e-mail behind your back from the e-mail client it is installed on. Absurd! Absolutely no integration at all. Hopefully this will be an improvement.

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Lightning isn't new, it's just that the roadmap was recently published.

And, IIRC, they *claim* they aren't targetting Outlook. :-)

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If it does not have exchange support, which I'm betting it won't, they'd be lambasted if they called it an outlook replacement.

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I would love a decent Mozilla-based alternative to Outlook. Exchange integration would also be wonderful, but doubtful.

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Only useful (for me) if it will sync with my Windows Mobile 2003 calendar and inbox.

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Been waiting for this for a very long time. Hopefully its worth the wait and they decided to take their time and get it right. We shall see. Sunbird was nice, but it was way to buggy for my tastes and the integration behind it was sloppy

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Yes, I personally can't wait for this. Though I must comment that this is older news (heard about it a couple months back)...but still good to hear it's still in the works :-)

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