Recently I began working from home as an independent contractor and needed calendaring functionality.

I now have the best of both worlds (for limited values of 'best').Īs an employee using a company-provided computer I always used the Microsoft Office products as required but at home, I chose years ago not to use, or even install, MS Office on my personal computer. I just disable its automatic send/receive email and made sure that it uses the right mail server to send meeting acceptance responses. I can double click and open it in Outlook.Īfter some futzing around, I quickly figured out that I can use Outlook merely as a calendar 'helper app' for Thunderbird. As a byproduct of installing Lightning, meeting notices now have explicit. I once again found myself in disbelief at the complete lack of good support for something so basic.īut then I noticed something. Since Sunbird isn't ready for prime time, I installed Lightning and quickly concluded that it sucks ass. Last night I discovered the Lightning Project, an extension which aims to provide integrated calendaring in Thunderbird (not to be confused with Mozilla Sunbird or Mozilla Calendar). Since I have an irrational fear and mistrust of Outlook (see also: email viruses, evil empire), switching is not an option for me. But it has no built-in calendar or ability to decode the vCalendar data embedded in meeting invitations. It's a bit buggy and quirky but generally quite flexible and smart. Many hours per month are wasted trying to coordinate basic scheduling tasks.īut enough people do use Outlook that I find myself having to deal with meeting invitations from them in Thunderbird, my email client of choice. Locating free times is a painful process. Everyone seems to be using a different email tool and there's no universally adopted caledaring tool at Yahoo.

One of the most painful aspects of being part of a large business these days is calendaring.

Mozilla thunderbird outlook calendar