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Sun Microsystems contributes to Lightning to create a Personal Application Manager (PIM) application for OpenOffice.org

Hi folks,
I have some really good news to share with you.

It's been officially confirmed by Michael Bemmer, Engineering Director at Sun Microsystems, on the OpenOffice.org Conference (OOoCon 2006) that Sun is contributing significantly to the Lightning Project to provide users with an alternative open source choice by combining OpenOffice.org respectively StarOffice and Thunderbird/Lightning.

You can find the details on slides 16-19 of Michael's presentation or watch his presentation on video (you need the ogg theora codec to watch the video).

Of course the development team is pretty excited about this, even though we were aware of this for some time already, as Sun has already contributed a lot of development effort to Lightning and Sunbird.

Please join me in welcoming the Sun developers into our community.

Posted by Simon Paquet on October 5, 2006 10:08 PM |

Comments

Awesome. This means more people to squash bugs. But, what about Sunbird.

Posted by: Matt | October 5, 2006 2:50 PM

Matt,
most of our code affects both Lightning and Sunbird. Therefore if you fix a bug in Lightning in 95% of all cases you will fix the same bug in Sunbird, too.

Posted by: Simon Paquet | October 5, 2006 3:30 PM

I really like the UI improvements mockup at the end of that slide deck.

Very cool.

Posted by: Ted Bullock | October 5, 2006 3:52 PM

I really like the upcoming UI look that Sun provided an image of in that slide.

Will Sunbird and Lightning both maintain the same look?

Posted by: Dave | October 5, 2006 5:42 PM

good to hear that.

Posted by: pooya | October 5, 2006 8:47 PM

Yes that's cool Hope to see sync (TB+Ligthing) with PalmOS+Symbian+Linux+Windows Mobile (there is a soft working to sync TB+Lighting against Outlook for Pocket PC)

Keep up the good work

Posted by: The_Fox | October 5, 2006 11:56 PM

Well the UI improvements will be a quantum leap for Lightning/Sunbird. I allways liked the Application, but hated the outdated look of the calendar itself, wich has not been changed since Mozilla Suite Milestone M6 (IIRC)...

Greetings,
Christoph

Posted by: Christoph | October 6, 2006 1:43 AM

Great to hear that Lightning will support Sun JES Calendar Server.

Posted by: Thorleif Wiik | October 6, 2006 3:56 AM

What a good news ! And the new layout looks fantastic. Thanks for the wiki link.

Posted by: Olivier | October 6, 2006 4:53 AM

I currently am not able to download the latest nighly. So, can somebody please tell me has the new UI been added to the nightly builds?

Posted by: matt | October 6, 2006 7:36 AM

By "combining" do you mean integrating OpenOffice.org with Lighting / Sunbird? Will these applications work together in some special way?

As far as I know, the limit of today's integration is something like 1) File->Send As Email and 2) copy and paste via clipboard 3) open attachments in OOo.

Posted by: Andrew Z | October 6, 2006 9:46 AM

Awesome! Hooray for Sun Microsystems.

Posted by: David Mackey | October 6, 2006 9:58 AM

Hope sync with Symbian comes real soon

Posted by: tim | October 6, 2006 11:02 AM

Ok I downloaded the new nightly version. So, I guess no new UI. I did notice it is now Sunbird rather than Calendar.

Posted by: Matt | October 6, 2006 11:30 AM

wow, fantastic news...

Posted by: zsdr | October 6, 2006 1:00 PM

I think everyone's really excited about this well overdue interest from other developers. Lets hope this extra input can make Sunbird/Lightning go to the top of the pile. *prays for mobile phone synching*

Posted by: Jon Prichard | October 10, 2006 7:51 PM