Tuesday, April 19, 2005

Lightning is the working project name for an extension to tightly integrate calendar functionality (scheduling, tasks, etc.) into Thunderbird.

The developers of Lightning are currently targeting a first general-user release for the middle of 2005.

With Lightning, Mozilla Thunderbird will have a set of user features that is much more competitive with Outlook, especially in enterprise usage. The primary goal of Lightning is to provide a pleasant and productive user experience for both email and calendaring tasks, largely independent of specific competitors' product plans. If the result of the Lightning project is an acceleration of users' migration from Outlook to Thunderbird, though, very few tears will be shed.

While Lightning will certainly incorporate concepts from Outlook — as from other email/calendar applications, such as Evolution, Remail and Chandler — it is not designed to be simply an "Outlook knock-off". Just as Thunderbird improved the email experience beyond what is provided by Outlook and Outlook Express, Lightning is designed to improve the calendaring experience for Outlook converts and newcomers to calendaring applications alike.