With this week's release of the Mozilla Project's Lightning calendar application (see yesterday's post below this one), we're beginning to hear some voices from within the blogosphere offer up their opinions.
The most immediate place to see what users are thinking is the Lightning suggestions wiki. TrimMail's Email Battles post breaks it down for us. Users want tight integration with Microsoft Exchange server, something that Mozilla can't offer. Lightning doesn't have an Exchange connector right now. It's in the developemnt plans, but there are also third-party Exchange connectors that could be integrated into the Mozilla suite as an extension. The Thunderbird/Lightning combo also isn't as good at handling group events or collaborative tasks as Outlook/Exchange, so that's another thing that's going to hold users back from making the switch.
As Email Battles points out, the Mozilla desktop suite still has a long way to go before it can promise the same enterprise backend integration that Microsoft's Office tools offer.
Still, Mozilla gets major points for being open source, extensilble, and free — especially among governments, non-profits, and large, security-conscious companies.
Another surprising suggestion that users bring up on the wiki is tabs. Users are asking for tabbed email and tabbed calendars. Will the tab architecture that evolutionized web browsing make the jump over to email and task management?
Follow further developments in Mozilla's Calendar Weblog.
[link via reddit]
