As easy I found to make the leap from Internet Explorer to Firefox, I can’t say that I have left behind Outlook in favour of Thunderbird, the Mozilla email client. Part of the reason is simply that Outlook is so much more than just an email client. I still rely heavily on its calendaring features and its ability to synchronize with my iPAQ.
The Mozilla group has been working on a calendar application called Sunbird but it works as a separate application. Fortunately, Lightning is a new calendaring component designed to integrate calendar functionality into Mozilla Thunderbird. It is in its very infancy but future functionality promisess email and task linkage, integration with the Thunderbird address book, cached calendar support for offline calendar use and device synchronization (this last one has me very intrigued).
Could there be an end to my dependence on Outlook?