Thunderbird 5 and Lightning for Enterprise Calendaring and Email

Posted by JD 07/22/2011 at 14:00

I have used Thunderbird for at least 8 yrs and used Mozilla Mail built into Mozilla/Netscape before that. When the company started using Zimbra for email, IM, calendaring, Lightning never quite worked correctly. With v5 of Thunderbird, the integration to Zimbra with Lightning is working well. After using it about 2 months, I haven’t seen any failures – even on complex calendar settings.

Thunderbird v5 + Lightning Installation Steps

These instructions are for Ubuntu, but probably work with other distros too.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/thunderbird-stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install thunderbird  xul-ext-lightning

I had performed these on a laptop a few weeks ago, but didn’t have the latest version installed on the desktop here. After searching for the instructions again for much too long, I decided to capture them so I’d never lose them again.

Zimbra Integration

Thunderbird has always worked well with Zimbra to my knowledge. IMAP, SMTP are pretty good standards that almost every (sorry MS), gets correct. Thunderbird has worked with Zimbra very well and continues to work well as it relates to email. Calendaring as always been a little flaky in my testings.

With Zimbra v7, the current release and the current Lightning extension to Thunderbird v5 integration with Zimbra’s enterprise calendaring works extremely well. Actually, that’s an understatement. I’d say it works perfectly, but doing that will certainly jinx my experience. ;) Since installing these updates a few weeks ago, I haven’t needed to use Zimbra’s fantastic web interface to manage any calendars. Invitations, finding free time for meeting participants, alarms, reminders, multiple calendars, you name it, everything works perfectly. Zimbra has some pretty great meeting reoccurance scheduling rules – 3rd Thursday of the month type scheduling. That all works through the Thunderbird+Lightning interface too.

Anyway, I’m an extremely happy camper. Now there’s no need for offices to buy MS-Exchange + MS-Office/Outlook to gain Enterprise Calendaring. The free Zimbra server + Thunderbird + Lightning have you covered completely.

These tools still feel extremely light-weight, unlike Outlook. I run them under Linux, but Thunderbird under Windows works pretty much the same, so I’d recommend that to everyone too.

Enterprise Calendaring – What’s that?

I talk about Enterprise Calendaring a lot. What do I really mean?

  • Calendars are stored on the server, not the client.
  • Multiple calendars are available for each user – home/work/holidays/different team calendars. You get the idea.
  • Finding availability of different resources is possible. Meeting rooms, projector equipment, and other people. This is a big deal in corporations.
  • Any client sees the current calendar. A desktop PC doesn’t need to be powered on for the smartphone or web interface to see accurate data.
  • Calendar management can be delegated to someone else. As a CxO, having a fantastic Admin person deal with my calendar is critical.
  • Automation. With server-side rules, automation can be added for calendar acceptance, rejection, or tagging.
  • Tagging – I haven’t used MS-Exchange in a few years, but Zimbra has supported tags for all that time. It has become a completely different way to handling project management here. Using automatic tags on calendars or email based on keywords has freed me and others from manually organizing things. Think of tags as virtual folders – I guess that’s the best way to explain it.
  • Server-side processing. Zimbra is a server and using the server hardware for processing means everything is faster regardless of your client PC/phone CPU/RAM. Searches happen on the server, not your desktop. Filters, rules, spam detection all happen on the server even when nobody is connected or logged in. THAT is extremely powerful.

Lightning Setup

To connect Lightning with Zimbra,

  1. open the Calendar from Thunderbird
  2. Right click under the Calendar on the left pane
  3. Choose New Calendar, which opens a connection wizard
    1. On the Network
    2. CalDAV
    3. Location: https://server.com/dav/zimbra-userid@server.com/Calendar This location may or may not be SSL (HTTP vs HTTPS) for your situation.
    4. Choose a Name for the calendar and a color so events are clear between different calendars. Names must be unique

*DO NOT delete the original, local PC, “Home” calendar that is not stored on a server. Doing this has caused big issues previously.

I didn’t get the Location correct the first time and the GUI doesn’t allow editing of the settings. The process to fix settings is to delete the old and add a new calendar.
OR
you can do like I did and shutdown Thunderbird, find the ~/.thunderbird/{random-directory/ and edit the prefs.js file. I made a minor fix to the location and everything was good. Unfortunately, Lightning stores passwords to access the remote calendars and doesn’t simply grab them from the other credentials for the same server used for IMAP or SMTP connections, so password updates will now need to be made in IMAP, SMTP and CalDAV connections.

I don’t use Google Calendar, but connecting to it appears to be included in Lightning. That could be great for Google-Cal users.