OpenOffice.org Grows Up

What About Outlook?

Microsoft’s decision long ago to market its Outlook e-mail and calen­daring application in with the rest of its Office suite has led most people to expect that all office productivity suites should come along with an Outlook analog. OpenOffice.org has never included such an application in its suite, and this state of affairs has not changed with version 3.

Instead, the OpenOffice.org project is pushing the duo of Mozilla’s Thunderbird mail cli­ent and Lightning calendaring add-on as its preferred route to replacing Outlook. In my testing of the Thunderbird/Lightning combo, I’ve been pleased overall with the pair’s performance and functional­ity, particularly regarding the spam filtering duties that Out­look tends to handle poorly.

However, the big prob­lem with Thunderbird as an Outlook replacement is the absence of the Mes­saging API protocol through which Outlook talks to Exchange. For e-mail, enabling IMAP in Exchange will do the trick, but Lightning does not link up to Exchange’s calendar and task list.

Lightning does support remote cal­endars exposed through iCal, CalDAV or Sun’s Java System Calendar Server, but the Exchange omission will pose problematic for many businesses, which would do well to remember that there’s no reason why one can’t simply team OpenOffice.org with Outlook.