275826 - Mozilla Lightning Idea - Support SyncML

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 121948

(Thunderbird :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Mike McCallister]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

Greetings,

Since it appears that Thunderbird + Firebird now wants to compete more with
Outlook, I'd like to propose an approach that may make this possible. 
Microsoft's comments here:

http://news.com.com/Mozillas+Lightning+to+strike+Outlook/2100-7344_3-5501618.html

Are valid to a certain extent.  People have come to demand more from "PIM"
applications.  Assuming Thunderbird and Sunbird were successfully integrated,
that alone is not enough to compete with Outlook + Exchange.  People want their
data seemlessly synced up to all interfaces in which they access it.  Exchange
provides this currently.  If I run Exchange and I can access my email, calendar,
and contacts from Outlook, Outlook Web Access, and portable devices (i.e. phones
and pdas) that offer Exchange plugins (i.e.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/) and everything "just works" seemlessly.

I believe the same can be said for Thunderbird + Sunbird without too much
effort.  Obviously, Thunderbird + Sunbird is just part of the solution in my
above example and I am not proposing that the Mozilla foundation tries to build
all the software for the whole solution.  I am proposing that we come up with a
viable solution to integrate all interfaces in which people access email,
calendar data, contact data, todo lists, etc. on their primary PIM app, web
based PIM interfaces, and mobile devices.

First lets take a look at what we have today: IMAP4 basically takes care of
email for us, LDAP to a certain extent handles contacts, and ICAL over WebDAV
handles calendar and todo list issues.  I am not proposing that these interfaces
are abandoned (especially IMAP) - but I would like to propose an alternative
that may offer an easier way to reach our end goal of complete PIM data
integration.  I'm not saying that LDAP and and ICAL over WebDAV are bad - I just
don't think they are going to offer a solution that can compete with Outlook +
Exchange.

I think SyncML (http://www.openmobilealliance.org/syncml) offers a viable
alternative that could relatively easily be bolted on to Thunderbird + Sunbird.
 SyncML offers the following benefits from my viewpoint:

   * Open standard that already has a lot of traction.  For example, it
     is part of the WAP 2.0 standard so 90% of the cell phones you can
     buy today already support synchronizing contacts, calendars, todo
     lists over HTTP/SyncML.  Also, many cell phones are now offering
     email clients with IMAP support.
   * To really compete with Outlook + Exchange, Thunderbird + Sunbird
     will need to support Exchange.  This is possible over SyncML and
     this open source project: http://sync4j.funambol.com/.
   * SyncML support should be there soon for the two most popular open
     source web mail clients: IMP (http://www.horde.org/imp/) and
     Squirrelmail (http://squirrelmail.org/).  For example, IMP is
     working on this already: http://www.horde.org/sync and a
     Squirrelmail plugin to support SyncML should be easy enough to
     write assuming Squirrelmail rolls out support for decent Calendar
     and Contacts (already in CVS for both)

Furthermore, the Mozilla Foundation could host documentation for sys admins on
how to setup Exchange integration over SyncML etc.  A comprehensive HowTo would
almost be a requirement since we are tying multiple software projects together
in order to offer rich PIM client + Webmail + Mobile device integration.

Anyways, I am just brain-storming here and thought I would share this idea since
this appears to be a topic of focus recently.  It would appear to me that this
would be the path of least resistance to offer a solution that can compete with
Outlook + Exchange.

Mike



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[zug_treno]

Related to/duplicate of bug 121948?

Comment 2

[Mike McCallister]

Yeah I guess it does relate to #121948.  Weird, when I typed in "syncml" into
the bugzilla search prior submitting this one, it returned no results.  Anyways,
hopefully SyncML support is on the horizon - I think that could really make a
difference for Thunderbird adoption.

Comment 3

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 121948 ***