I’m rubbing my hands with glee with the thought of Google Chrome OS punishing Windows in the desktop market, but I also fear trading one desktop operating system overlord for another.
I’ve been using Mozilla Thunderbird pretty extensively past few months. Even though I do have Microsoft Outlook installed on my work laptop – with the amount of mails that I send and receive, Outlook just dies when the Inbox size shoots up and that’s an absolute killer. One of the problems with Thunderbird is that unlike Outlook, its an email-client, and not a complete PIM suite, and my work requires me to maintain an extensive calender system. But thanks to addons, you don’t have to worry about this. Let me show you how you can convert Mozilla Thunderbird to complete PIM suite.
The first thing we need to do, is have a Calender system in Mozilla Thunderbird. There are couple of addons for this, but IMO the Lightning project is probably the best of the lot. Lightning project also allows you to accept Outlook meeting invites, but we’ll get to that in a while.
Head over to Lightning project homepage, and download the addon as per your platform. Next, install the addon by clicking on Tools -> Addons -> Install and then point it to the location where you have downloaded the addon. Restart Thunderbird and you will get a Calender and tasks pane on the lower left corner, and an events sidebar.
Download Google Voice and Video software. Google Voice and Video let’s you chat by using voice and video with your contacts. It just requires a few seconds to download the software and it’s really easy to install. Try it now.
Google Voice and Video is a great alternative to MSN Messenger. Google Voice and Video is more secure and fit well with the rest of your Google applications.
