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.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 5th, 2006 at 10:08 pm and is filed under Lightning, Sunbird. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

17 comments

  1. Matt
    October 5, 2006 at 2:50 pm

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

  2. Simon Paquet
    October 5, 2006 at 3:30 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.

  3. Ted Bullock
    October 5, 2006 at 3:52 pm

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

  4. Dave
    October 5, 2006 at 5:42 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?

  5. pooya
    October 5, 2006 at 8:47 pm

    good to hear that.

  6. The_Fox
    October 5, 2006 at 11:56 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

  8. Christoph
    October 6, 2006 at 1:43 am

    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 I allways liked the Application, but hated the outdated look of the calendar itself, wich has not been changed since Mozilla Suite Milestone M6 (IIRC)…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

  9. Thorleif Wiik
    October 6, 2006 at 3:56 am

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

  10. Olivier
    October 6, 2006 at 4:53 am

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

  11. matt
    October 6, 2006 at 7:36 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?

  12. Andrew Z
    October 6, 2006 at 9:46 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.

  13. David Mackey
    October 6, 2006 at 9:58 am

    Awesome! Hooray for Sun Microsystems.

  14. tim
    October 6, 2006 at 11:02 am

    Hope sync with Symbian comes real soon

  15. Matt
    October 6, 2006 at 11:30 am

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

  16. zsdr
    October 6, 2006 at 1:00 pm

    wow, fantastic news…

  17. Jon Prichard
    October 10, 2006 at 7:51 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*