Obvious but overlooked?
First, I VERY much look forward to this release so I can abandon the bloated software that is Outlook but still integrate with Exchange. This may be an obvious feature but a Thunderbird user should be able to right-click any received email and assign it to the calendar. The 'Flag for Follow-up' feature in Outlook is ok, but you could make it SO much better. Many of the below ideas are excellent, but don't overlook basic functionality!
KM
SyncML and Symbian smartphone support
SyncML is a standard for synchronisation that has been adopted in the Symbian OS used by the majority of smartphones. This will make Lighning compatible with Nokia Series 60/80 handsets and SonyEricsson p900/910 devices plus many more.
Paul A.
Thunderbird-Sunbird/Lightning for Pocket PC
One of the features I miss the most, when using Thunderbird/Sunbird, is the ability to synchronize my calendar and contacts to my Ipaq running pocket PC 2003. Are you going to develop a Pocket PC version of Lightning (Thunderbird/Sunbird)?
I third that notion. If you need to use a Pocket PC, there are no real alternatives to outlook for sync at this time. It would be really nice to use Sunbird/Lightning for this task. Some places to look for inspiration would be the Sync4j project and MultiSync project.
Yet another request in support of this idea. The Pocket PC is my lifeline when I'm away from the PC, so synchronization with my calendar/contacts is vital. Only, please do a better job than the wretched ActiveSync! The HotSync system for Palm, particularly the DataViz sync products, are far superior to ActiveSync in letting the user control how they handle conflicts.
2/24/05 - I'm another person who would love to switch to Thunderbird but I have one problem: ActiveSync. I have a MS Smartphone (Motorola MPX200), and I really need to be able to get contacts, calendar, and tasks items from my desktop to my phone. I'm thinking about using Thunderbird and trying to import the information into Outlook any time I need to sync in the meantime. If anyone has any ideas when Thunderbird support for MS Mobile Smartphones synching would happen, would love to know. With 25 million desktops, I'm sure there will be more requests like this one. Plus, synch capability would help Thunderbird get into some corporate environments who aren't on MS Exchange (i.e. environments where employees have smartphones but the corporation doesn't have MS Exchange to block Thunderbird from coming in).
I agree and disagree. I think it should synch with PocketPC, but I'd rather see a BETTER Inbox, Tasks, Calendar for the PocketPC - and not like the more complicated software out there, like Informit. Needs to be simple, but smarter. Thats all I want in life.
4/5/05 - One more looking for integration with a pocket pc (or any smart phone for that matter). I would love to see a full-featured Mozilla PIM - Thunderbird + Contacts + Calendar. I currently have a pocket pc based smartphone, and dearly miss syncing mail, contacts, and calendar with mozilla.
8/25/05 - Me too if I'm not too late to express hope. I don't need too much complexity, just contacts (INCLUDING categories field please, unlike Outlook Express), RTF files for personal ongoing notes, email, and calendar. I'd LOVE to get Outlook off my back, just as I loved getting IE off my back.
9/5/05 - Ditto! The only thing keeping me from employing Thunderbird is my need to sync Outlook to my MPX200.
9/6/05 - I'm another looking for Pocket PC synch with Thunderbird/Sunbird.
19/9/05 - I agree, I would have got rid of outlook years ago if I had a thunderbird mail, task and calendar client for my IPAQ. There are millions of people using thunderbird and Firefox on desktop PC's so why not on an Ipaq with a cool Mozilla sync agent. This would give Thunderbird and Firefox a majour helping hand against becoming a rival against Microsoft.
It would also be nice to have some form of 'Shared' calendar functionality, similar to how Outlook's calendar works with M$ Exchange - So users can share a sort-of 'Global' calendar and see each others events. Panther
It could be important for old Outlook users to have the Free/Busy indicator on shared calendars. Merome
Re: Pather's idea, I think it should be more-so than Outlook's shared calendar. There needs to be a way for a group of users to hold personal calendars and, without much trouble, have a group/office calendar with a 'public' subset of the member's personal appointments in it. Additionally, the ability to add a meeting to the group calendar that is automatically added to the member's personal calendars is a must. Multiple group membership would also be a prerequisite. The idea would be to store the data once and have it display in more than one place. Right now, the secretaries in my office have to double-book meetings (once in everyone's personal calendars, then once in the public calendar). Everyone is frustrated at the extra work required and it would be wise to strike while the iron's hot.
A Thunderbird/Mozilla Calendar - Windows Smartphone application...why such a thing would be revolutionary, and would reduce my need to use Microscraps Outlook to zero, with the exception of going back to see why I left it in the first place. Please please please please pretty please develop such and application.
I agree that shared calendaring is a must, but I like Sunbird's way of amalgamating calendars into one view. In the example above, you'd just create the group calendar and import it into Lightning. You would need to make sure that the calendar was refreshed or checked periodically to make sure that things were up to date.
In addition, I would dearly like to layer calendars, and have some calendars (like a group calendar I'm not particularly interested in most of the time) appear washed out or translucent. I could set that calendar to be unobtrusive by having it in the background of my main composite calendar display and events in it would be faded and covered by events in the composite on top.
Palm Sync & Pocket PC
I Would Like To See Lightning Synchronize With The Palm Date Book.
Please don't forget about the Pocket PC. I would ditch Outlook if there was a Mozilla based project that could replace the contacts, appointments, and other data through the activesync.
Please post information about how to get involved with the development. This Palm Sync with the Mozilla calendar issue has been troubling me for a long time. So far there has been no information on this site except for the fact that this project has been announced.
I could move my company tomorrow if we had this feature. I may even be able to get sponser dollars. How would I go about this?
The folks at Sync4j (http://www.sync4j.org) have an open source product that could be used to sync Palm and PocketPC with Thunderbird. All it needs is someone who can program. They would be keen to help but don't have the resources. I am happy to test but I can't program. Any volunteers?
What about Blackberry sync? I don't know of any open source calendar/groupware projects that sync with RIM's Blackberry. That would be a great feature.
Exchange
Since Novel has released their exchange interface Open Source will this functionality be included into Lightning? This feature would allow me to switch straight away.
Notes
I was very excited when I heard of the announcement of this project. It has almost everything I need to make the switch. If it includes a "Notes" feature, I would make the switch. Not that me making the switch is very significant for anyone but me.
Other Open Source Projects
Evolution is backending to the opengroupware, which has a html interface to most exchange like functions. I am not sure at which level that lightning could replace outlook. Will it just be on the interface level ? Connecting to an exchange server ?
Red Hat has also recently purchased Netscape from AOL, I believe that this may also include the Netscape Calendering server, which may be an interesting addition to any server side application which may wish to replace exchange.
Looking at the server side, which is important when it comes to a groupware / pseudo-groupware aspect of this, there is SchoolBell, the calendar server component from SchoolTool, which has recently had its 1.0 release. We are successfully running Sunbird as clients with SchoolBell as server in our office for calendar sharing. http://www.schooltool.org/schoolbell
What is the Public's Desire
As the Product Manager for an application that adds Infuzer powered events and itineraries directly into electronic calendars without the need to cut and paste or type anything(currently Outlook, Lotus Notes and Palm Desktop), I am charged with keeping up with the pulse of consumer demand for supporting new platforms. If I make a case for it, I can pressure our developers to start the process of supporting this project. Let me know if this type of convenience feature is important to all of you. Additionally, sports schedules, public holidays and weather are also "events" that can be added in a single click.
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We need more visibility about this project, a lot of sys admin (like me) are looking to Mozilla Lightning in order to replace their Exchange/Outlook solution. We need an official full description of functionalities and a clear roadmap (what will really be available mid-2005 ?). Please save us from a new couple of years with Outlook/Exchange !
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Not sure where to add this, but tabs for each of email, calendar, and tasks would be a really nice way to embed the calendar into thunderbird, and make it really easy to switch between the various elements.
Delayed Sending
In order to achieve professional usability of Mozilla, delayed sending of emails by using date/time of a Calender dropdown (similar to Outlook) should be included.
Actually this feature should appear on a 'most wanted' list.
brgds Manfred
Exchange replacement
I have removed Exchange and replace it with Linux running Cyrus IMAP, Postfix SMTP, Amavisd-new, Spamassassin, ClamAV and OpenLDAP, but the lack of Calendaring is a problem.
Most of my users don't want to work in a web interface (but they do want it available when they are out of the office) Thunderbird with Lightning may be the missing piece of the jigsaw.
Thunderbird / Lightning needs to have an interface to the Cyrus sieve server rules (at the moment we use a webmail plugin to manage the rules).
It also needs to have a Calendar with the ability to view other users calanders and send / receive meeting requests.
A server based address book (LDAP or SQL) so that my contacts are available in Thunderbird / Lightning and Webmail would be great.
Actually, your mentioning SQL makes good sense. Why not just use an SQL based database server for calendar and contacts? Think about it:
- Built for speedy data access (reliable data indexing, etc.)
- Built for multiple simultaneous users from the ground up
- Standards compliant (ANSI SQL) (could be fueled by Interbase/firebird, MySql, PostgreSQL, Oracle or SQL Server)
- Anyone could build a web interface, or you could even use the existing scheme for a web based calendar like Horde 3 or e-groupware giving users web based access right off the bat!
Tablet PC Integration
I've been looking for a good place for tablet integration inside of the mozilla products. Task management, notes and calendaring, integrated with email/rss would be the perfect home for Ink support. See OneNote and FranklinCovey TabletPlanner
-Andrew
Making Task Management more Collaborative
The biggest limitation for Outlook / task management applications is their myopic, user centric focus. This may sound a bit misguided since the calendaring being discussed is "my" calendar, but hear me out.
Collaborative task management is the primary focus of what many of us do for a living. Get this done by making sure he finishes this; make sure she does that, etc. Within the discussion for Lightning (that I've seen), the focus is on my managing what I've done by actively adjusting the list AND communicating separately surrounding the tasks. If I want Bill to finish something that I had originally placed on my to-do list, I will need to revise the original to-do so that it incorporates the revisions (assigned to Bill, follow up by date, check status on this date, etc.) and I will need to communicate the changes to Bill. This should happen more seamlessly.
The functionality I'm suggesting is a combination of Outlook and Project, incorporated into the email project. Basecamp is an excellent example of the elegent simplicity that task management can be...integrated into a mail/calendar app it would add amazing leverage. If the systems were indeed used as an exchange replacement with a SQL db, centralized management should be available.
With a centralized management, repeatable functional tasks could be templated and assigned quickly (See basecamp example). Beyond basecamp functionality, tasks could interplay with messages to re-assign, elevate, note exception while continuously showing status to the access group. This notion will require administrative functionality for management of access levels and participation, but shouldn't be too difficult.
If distributed is the primary structure, then an integration of mail and task to record assignment, completion, acceptance, etc. would still be a valuable part of the calendaring ability.
Printing Capabilities
I've used the calendar tools under the Common Desktop Environment as well as Lotus Notes and another one I can't remember. There are some things I really want from a calendar tool and I haven't seen one that does a good job of it all.
First, what I want is to be able to program in recurring meetings and other events. Then I want to print the calendar for the month out on large paper, like legal-size or executive. From there I pencil-in things as they come up, and I use the blank days before the first day of the month and after the last day of the month to write in general items that don't happen on a particular day.
This is useful to me because I can use my hardcopy calendar without having to constantly interact with a computer. As new recurring events come up, I program them in and run off the next month's calendar when I need it. This may sound kind of stone-age to some of you palm-pilot etc. users but there may be others who like hardcopy calendars but would like to be able to program in recurring events.
The main thing is that I'd like to ask for some features in the calendar tool that probably aren't hard to implement, you just may not have thought of them because you use the tool differently than I do. Here goes:
- Be able to print to letter, legal, and executive-size paper. The edges of the calendar rectangle should fit close to the edges of the paper, so printing to larger paper will give larger boxes for each day of the month, and give more room for event information, whether printed automatically or penciled-in on the hardcopy.
- Use small enough font that the printed calendar can fit maybe 8 events per day with 2-3 lines of description per event, like time, title, location, and call-in number. All these details need to be printed, although the online calendar could contain other fields of information that don't print out.
- Rescale the size of the calendar for months that span 4 or 5 weeks on a Sunday-to-Saturday layout. Also, when printing a full month, leave the boxes empty that precede the 1st day and that follow the last day of the month.
That's really all I'd have to ask for. To me it seems strange that so many of the tools I've seen do things like print different weeks with different sized boxes, or leave huge margins and not have enough room in the boxes for any information, or use a huge font so only the times show up and not the names of the events.
Hope you're interested, thanks. -- Carl Ponder
Follow-up: I'm looking at the Mozilla Calendar Tool that plugs into the
Thunderbird mail-system. Here are the problems with the print capability:
- First, the calendar doesn't go to the printer, you just get a viewable calendar that doesn't have any provision to print. That said, what follows are the formatting issues...
- The descriptions of the events are not well formatted. It may mean well by aligning the text separately from the event time, but this means a lot of wasted whitespace and one event takes 7 lines to describe and fills the whole day's box. This should all wrap around into about 3 contiguous lines.
- The margins are much too wide. The calendar grid needs to be expanded a *lot*. There would be room for more events-per-day if item #2 were corrected and the daily boxes were made bigger by shrinking the margins.
- Finally, the viewable calendar is shown in "portrait" mode, so only the top 2/3 of the page are filled. The layout needs to be *landscape* for a month view -- because you have 7 days times 4-5 weeks, it's natural that the grid should be wider then it is high.
I don't know whether "Lightning" is starting with the same code-base as this.... -- Carl Ponder
- As it says in the documentation, Lightning is NOT starting from the same code-base.
- I would like to digress a little on what kind of "printing capabilities" I would like to see from Lightning. In Outlook 2003 I typically print out my entire day in color with two smaller frames on the right that include my tasks and room for notes. Lightning should be able to approximate this view for me to be truly happy with a switch. Also, I love to save paper by printing two days at a time with a Landscape orientation. -Patrick Ryan
Official Name
Just being goofy, but Thunderbird + Sunbird = Lightningbird? --WorldMaker
Interlinking
Many years ago there was an excellent product, can't recall the name, that used a Filofax(tm) metafore for the user interface. I think Lotus bought it out in the end.
Within this was an excelent feature allowing interlinking of calendar, contacts, notes, to do's etc. by clicking on a chain (...link) icon and then on the two items to link. The linked items then showed a chain symbol on them which acted as a hyper link Between them. Each item could be linked to any number of others but onlu one hyperlink was ever shown, hovering the cursor over it gave a select list of links.
This was the most useful feature I have ever found in one of the organiser type products but I have never seen this in any product since.
[piers7: IIRC, you're describing OfficeTalk, and yes it was a neat feature]
Linked Dates
Someone else talked about being able to right click and send an email straight to the calendar.
I would like to see all dates found in a email become linked (e.g., "May 20" or "7/19/06"). When you hover over the link, a menu appears and shows any events you have that day as well as an option to add a new event to that date.
Import/Export to/from XML
This would be nice, for example, for exporting/importing to/from a personal website etc (along with contact details).
Contact - Define Relationships
Between contacts relationships should be definable, e.g. brother, mother, spouse. In case of an address change an option list with all contacts at the same address should appear where a selection of the concerned items can be checked.
Netmanage Ecco
It seems like a lot of interesting things are converging here. I had been loooking for a good powerful PIM to use instead of Outlook or Palm Desktop and discovered Ecco Pro from Netmanage which was free for download; but still closed source. Now that I have been using it for a while, I have really came to appreciate it; but wish it had email capablilites. Then I downloaded Firebird to start playing with it. Then I discovered last month that Netmanage was about to release the Ecco code as Open Source (probably under GPL). Now this week, I find out about Lightning. Has anyone in the Thunderbird/Sunbird/Lightning community thought about utlizing some of the Ecco functionality or building API's or tie-ins between the two. It seems like a golden opportunity. Ecco won a ton of awards as the best PIM out there before it was killed off by bundled Outlook.
Write to LDAP
Would be nice a feature that permit write over a LDAP directory used for contact (no just search and read but write and delete stuff). I guess the only program do this is Evolution2.
Calendar - Right-click to set as wallpaper based on resolution.
After using Sunbird more and more I was thinking if it would be possible to add an option when right-clicking on the Calendar itself that would allow you to set it as your wallpaper automatically rendered to the current resolution. I was also told on IRC that it should update therefore I would think option in the options menu itself to "Set calendar as wallpaper on exit" would be appropriate to accomodate this new "wallpaper" function. Does this sound like something very useful and convenient only to me or others too?
Taicho
Calendar function: Layered approach
It would be a great competitive advantage over other tools if Lightning could include a "layered" view of the calendar.
Imagine a normal calendar view, full of appointments, birthdays, anniversaries, public holidays etc. Then add other recurring items such as work-out schedules, spouses travel plans, childrens after-school activities etc. In the end, a normal "vacant day" ends up so packed that it's impossible to distinguish it from a real packed day.
Introducing :LAYERED CALENDAR - where users with a click of a button can chose what to see. Import your spouse's calendar into your own to see where you both have free time, then add or remove workout schedules, non-mandatory weekly conference calls, etc etc.
This can not be achieved by "Free/Busy" as my local gym, my conference calls etc, are not available there. Thus the "Layered View" where I through a checklist decide how much/little I want to see. I could even include my favorite TV show or newscast which I try to watch if there's nothing else, but don't want it to polute my normal calendar view...
Thanks for considering this!
Email + Calendar Synergisms
I think there are a couple of features where the tight integration of email and calender would allow new features that would immensely benefit users who have to work a lot with email and with a lot of emails.
For instance in a setting where you work for several projects and many of the hundreds of emails you get per week require follow-up actions it is extremely hard no to find out which emails are still relevant, which actions to do based on which emails, and until when to do them.
It would be great to be able to associate information about follow-up actions and deadlines with emails. Emails could be grouped, color-coded, filtered depending on whether there are still uncompleted follow up actions or missed deadlines. Deadlines could automatically show up in the calendar and there could be links to relevant emails.
There should also be much more possibilities to group emails and assign arbitrary keywords and notes. It should be possible that emails show up in several folders depending on the assigned lables (similar to Gmail).
The possibility to attach notes and todo lists would make it easy to keep track of what has been done and still needs to be done for an email or a group of emails (a thread).
There are many additional things that would make sense to provide, simply based on how people would *like* and *need* to work when emil and deadlines are an important part of their daily work.
This project would be an excellent chance to make this killer application a reality -- I do not know any program that really offers this in a well designed manner. TB/Lightning could be the first.