I had a play around with the newly-released Sunbird 0.2 today. I've never really used a calendar application before but with a lot of stuff going on in my life right now having some way of organising myself would be useful.
It's pretty easy to use - I was able to get up and running in no time, and managed to get my timetable added in (with recurrent events set up). Furthermore, while it is quite powerful, the interface has been kept quite simple.
Obviously this is a 0.2 release and so it's got a long way to go - I encountered some bugs when selecting a day of the month in the future, and there's arguably quite a bit of functionality that could be added, but it's a nice start. It'll also be interesting to see how the 'Lightning' project goes to create a cross-platform Outlook competitor based on Sunbird and Thunderbird.
When Thunderbird and Sunbird merge, then we will have a serious application, and a serious contendor to Outlook (not Express).
I think it is time for me to give Sunbird a try. I really need a calender/task application. Several months ago I went from Thunderbird to Outlook and it only took a week for me to return to Thunderbird. However I do miss the calender/task features and Sunbird would be perfect.
As alsotop said, I cannot wait for Thunderbird and Sunbird to merge into Lightning. That has a TON of protential to be the next Firefox. IMHO, that also could represent one of the better opprotunities for the Mozilla Foundation to get users to use Firefox (and also perhaps donate money/buy support?) by offering an e-mail/calender/task solution for companies.
interesting - i’d never even heard of sunbird or lightning. I still think outlook (in corporate edition) is excellent, especially 2003 but its crippled when dealing with internet(pop3) accounts but it is great to have almost everything in one place especially now there are numerous rss aggregators that work with outlook. This Sunbird is going to need to have pretty major takeup for it to start being useful - but then look at how successful firefox is.
Hmm, weren’t Novell talking about porting Evolution to Windows recently? Now that really would be an Outlook replacement. Sunbird is just too young to get into any business and it would certainly need an Exchange connector.