GullFOSS
OpenOffice.org Engineering at Sun
 
Subscribe
Subscribe to RSS Feed RSS Feed
Subscribe to Atom Feed Atom Feed
Bookmark to del.icio.us Bookmark to del.icio.us

Today's Page Hits: 716

 
Archives
 
« May 2008
SunMonTueWedThuFriSat
    
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
       
Today
Links




Flickr Photos
More Flickr photos tagged with openoffice
Locations of visitors to this page
all tags: accessibility api aqua architecture automated_tests base build calc chart code community compiler cws database development directx download draw eis events export extensions features filter framework graphics gsl gsoc gullfoss i18n import impress installation irc iso26300 java l10n localization mac macros netbeans odf odff ooo ooocon ooxml opendocument openoffice.org patch pdf performance plugin podcast porting qa quality release report sdk snapshot software specification spreadsheet staroffice statistics sun svg toolkit tools usability user-experience vba web wiki writer writerfilter xml
« Development at a... | Main | Development at a... »
Wednesday, 09 Apr 2008
A PIM for OpenOffice.org – What's going on?
Daniel Boelzle
In 2006, a Personal Information Manager (PIM) has been added to the roadmap of OpenOffice.org. Users constantly asked for this feature, and it's still seen as a key missing piece towards a full OpenSource Office solution. The PIM targets to complete OpenOffice.org's productivity offering by providing an integrated E-Mail, calendaring and addressbook client. The roadmap presented at OOoCon 2007 lists it as one of the highlights of the upcoming OpenOffice.org 3.0 release.

So, what has happened and is going on in this project, what's the current status?
Back in 2006, a team of Sun's StarOffice engineers joined the Mozilla Calendar Project in order to improve and contribute to its products: Lightning, a calendaring add-on for Thunderbird and Sunbird, a standalone calendar client (sharing the same code base). Especially Thunderbird/Lightning seems to perfectly fit the needs:

By now, we have contributed to several releases of Lightning and Sunbird. Not only in terms of code – but also in terms of feature and roadmap planning, user interface design, testing and release engineering. We first focussed on improving the core product(s) rather than an integration story with OpenOffice.org, implementing features, but also fixing bloody bugs.
The product(s) already offer a pretty decent feature set like nice event and task handling, a today pane for Thunderbird, popup alarms, good timezone support, E-Mail based invitations, support for various remote protocols, e.g. WebDAV (ics files), CalDAV, WCAP (Sun Java System Calendar Server) or Google Calendar. With the latest Lightning 0.8, a new task mode has been added, providing fine-grained control over tasks.

What I like most on Thunderbird/Lightning is to have both E-Mail and an aggregrate of all my various calendars in one application: public holiday calendars, my Sun work calendars and all people I am subscribed to, my private calendar, my wife's Google calendar, the team's calendar...

Check it out! It's certainly not final, but we like to know what you think about it. Moreover if you have fresh ideas about an integration with OpenOffice.org or want to help another way, let us know.

tags:

Posted by Daniel Boelzle on 09 Apr 2008  |  PermaLink |  Bookmark to del.icio.us Bookmark to del.icio.us |  Digg this Digg this  |  Comments[14]

Comments:

I met some Sunbird people at FOSDEM 2008 and get information that the project is going on.

Anyway, seems like it can't make in time of OpenOffice 3.x? We need to wait for OOo 4?

Posted by Isriya on April 09, 2008 at 10:38 AM CEST #

Thanks for the update. You are saying the 2007 OOoCon roadmap is still current, and OOo will simply distribute Thunderbird/Lightning (a <1.0 product) without integration for OOo 3.0?

Also, your RSS comment feeds (from autodiscovery) are invalid. I don't see anywhere else on this page to report it.

http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fblogs.sun.com%2FGullFOSS%2Ffeed%2Fcomments%2Fatom
http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fblogs.sun.com%2FGullFOSS%2Ffeed%2Fcomments%2Frss

Posted by Andrew Z. on April 09, 2008 at 03:19 PM CEST #

Hi!

I think Calender/Lighting/Thunderbird still lack enterprise features. First of all I would like to know what happened with StarOffice 5.2 built-in messaging system. There was a client for such task, with calendar, and etc. Why don't you come back that stuff, that naturally align to the OpenOffice.org. Are there chance to make it work under 2.x/3.x? Did you examined this way? Why did you lose it?
Also I would like to add that I am sure you can some integration features but I am sure it will not tight integration as we can speak in case of Outlook or OpenOffice.org components itself. So Thunderbird is good e-mail client, I like it and use it, but I see lots of problem. Firs of all - integration with Exchange and Groupwise systems. Here I would like to see Evolution integration because this program provides more enterprise features than Thunderbird.
What is your opinion?

Posted by KAMI on April 09, 2008 at 05:08 PM CEST #

I agree Exchange compatibility is important for many enterprises, but Evolution's support for Windows is poor. A while back, I stopped using Evolution on Windows because of bugs and performance, and then Thunderbird introduce some nice usability features.

I have been using Lightning at home on Linux for about a year. It's OK for home use. Last year, I tried to use Sunbird and Lightning in a small office, and the group calendaring and scheduling were not so good through email and WebDAV. (I wasn't able to try WCAP.) Lightning's pace of development is good, and I expect to see much progress soon from Lightning and OSAF Chandler.

KAMI, you seem to favor integrating OOo with a PIM. What is the advantage of such a suite vs. best of breed?

Posted by Andrew Z. on April 10, 2008 at 05:38 AM CEST #

DO NOT forget sync capabilities with PDA, MID, and phone devices.

Support will be necessary for:

Windows Mobile
iPhone
Symbian
Android
Blackberry/RIM

Posted by sparky on April 11, 2008 at 02:56 AM CEST #

Yes sync is very important at lots of company.
Andrew: You can build Evolution from much more up to date sourcecode :D

Posted by KAMI on April 12, 2008 at 02:33 PM CEST #

Kami, I don't understand how you could think that the old StarSchedule code would "naturally align" with OOo?

This code was written by a developer that left us even before we started OpenOffice.org. The code is not Open Source, it is dead since 8 years or so, doesn't compile at all on any of our platforms and it uses completely outlined base libraries and concepts. So basically it is useless and had to rewritten completely.

Compared to that lightning aligns much better: it is Open Source code, it compiles on all platforms OpenOffice.org supports, the code of Lightning is mainly written by OpenOffice.org developers.

You have a strange understanding of "natural alignment". :-)

Posted by Mathias Bauer on April 16, 2008 at 03:52 PM CEST #

Forgot to mention:

The same is true for the mail client used by StarSchedule (StarMail).

Posted by Mathias Bauer on April 16, 2008 at 03:59 PM CEST #

It would be good to be able to use Write as my email editor.

Posted by Keith Barclay on April 30, 2008 at 02:16 PM CEST #

Is it possible to convert my old Lotus Organiser 5.0 to Open Office software. I am totally pleased with all the other OO software and would like to get rid of the old Lotus suite?

Posted by Ian Drake on April 30, 2008 at 02:46 PM CEST #

Something a lot of software developers forget. An easy to backup for all these programs , and an even easier restore from a usb or other device to make users smile once again....
Most problems occur due to failure to backup. Make it automagic and make it fast...

Posted by Jonno on April 30, 2008 at 03:56 PM CEST #

Include Palm in your list of things to sync.

Posted by J.David Knepper on April 30, 2008 at 05:43 PM CEST #

Lightning with Thunderbird is certainly promising, but it would be nice if the "fine-grained control over tasks" also included the previous facility to hide completed tasks in the Task mode. It's still present in the Today pane in the Mail mode so the functionality is still accessible.

Posted by Peter Hillier-Brook on April 30, 2008 at 05:59 PM CEST #

I would say without a doubt from a pure user and non-technical type, that all of the above items mentioned are important but I have to agree with the contributors who have mentioned hand-held devices, whether they be PDA's, Mobile phones or Windows Mobile and whatever OS they use, someone has to come up with a 'cross-platform' syncing program. I don't know anything about programming, but now that even the smallest Mobile Phones support Java is it not possible to create a program that could be an industry wide standard that, via Bluetooth etc. allow exchange/Full synchronisation of Thunderbird/Lightning files between these devices AND the programs themselves on our computers?

Posted by Colin Richardson on May 01, 2008 at 01:52 AM CEST #

Post a Comment:
Comments are closed for this entry.
« Development at a... | Main | Development at a... » GullFOSS