Mozilla unveils Lightning roadmap

Device synchronisation and offline calendar support are some of the features planned in a future version of the open source project.

The Mozilla Foundation has published an initial roadmap for 'Lightning', the project to integrate its calendar application Sunbird with its e-mail application Thunderbird. Sunbird has been available as a separate extension for Firefox and Thunderbird for a while, but there's been little integration between calendar and e-mail functionality.

The team working on Lightning -- a code name, rather than an official product name at present -- hope that the integration of scheduling and tasks with Thunderbird's e-mail capabilities will make the combined application more attractive to corporate users, although they're not specifically targeting Microsoft Outlook.

The roadmap outlines some of the features that will be included in the first two versions of Lightning and in future releases of the project. Lightning 0.1, which is planned for release in November, will include fixes for the most important bugs, such as those that cause the loss of data. The team also hopes to be able to use the software as their working calendar application by this stage, a process known as 'dogfooding'. This relies on Lightning being able to do calendar sharing using the WebDAV protocol.

The subsequent release of Lightning will include features such as better Thunderbird integration, including linking e-mails and tasks. Mozilla developers are also planning to add support for localisation, device synchronisation and offline calendar access in future releases of the project, according to the roadmap.

ZDNet UK's Ingrid Marson reported from London. For more coverage from ZDNet UK, click here.