When will lightning be able to send outlook compatible response to invitation

[Eric Valette]

It was not far from working in the old 0.7 time. The response was not
directly accessible to outlook users as it was an attachment but at
least when they click they were able to see the anwser.

With 1.0 (as well as 0.9 BTW), there is no way to get anything that
outlook can open. I keep having remarks from collegues that I just send
garbage to their invitation. selecting or not the outlook compatible
button does not change anything.

-- eric

[Simon Paquet]

Eric Valette wrote:

The answer to your question is: It will be fixed once we find someone
with sufficient interest, who can code a bugfix.

At this moment, the person who originally coded the iMIP/iTIP stuff
(Clint) is no lonmger actively working for the Calendar project, because
Mozilla Corporation hired him as a QA engineer. He has been swamped with
work ever since.

We have one person (Philipp) who has a part-time contract with Mozilla
Messaging to work on Calendar bugs, but with our current state of things,
full outlook compatibility is not his highest priority. And rightfully
so.

We also have people like Martin, Stefan and a few other who contribute a
few fixes here and there, but that's basically it.

I have said this many times, but I will say it again:
If you want something fixed, step up, learn to code and do it. This is an
open source project. We're more than happy to take fixes from whoever
provides them.

The Calendar Project is a highly visible project and there's probably no
other project in the Mozilla space, where one could make an impact for
our users in a shorter period of time. It's your chance to take!

Simon Paquet
--
Thunderbird/Calendar Localisation (L10n) Coordinator
Thunderbird l10n blog: http://thunderbird-l10n.blogspot.com
Calendar website maintainer: http://www.calendar-project.org
Calendar developer blog: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/calendar

[Daniel Boelzle [:dbo]]

Hello (again) Eric,

there's no current OL compat bug known to me -- maybe I've missed one?
The last time I've tested OL compat (around the time I've reworked the
whole code last year), it's been working well (against more or less all
prominent OL versions with one or the other tweak).
So it doesn't help: you need to get more into detail and describe OL
versions your friends are using, some details about the events and iTIP
messages would be helpful, too. All this typically leads to a filed bug
to be investigated; maybe there's a regression since there've been
changes to the iTIP subsystem. But I think you already know this.

thank you,
Daniel

> _______________________________________________
> support-calendar mailing list
> support-...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/support-calendar

[Eric Valette]

On 07/11/2009 20:38, Daniel Boelzle [:dbo] wrote:
> Hello (again) Eric,
>
> there's no current OL compat bug known to me -- maybe I've missed one?
> The last time I've tested OL compat (around the time I've reworked the
> whole code last year), it's been working well (against more or less all
> prominent OL versions with one or the other tweak).

Once I will be back at work, I will send you the exact version of
outlook (its the one that comes with office 2003 + service pack probably
2). And I will also send the message actually sent on an invitation.

As I have almost all my windows co-worker buging me, I annoy me.
Last time I remember it worked was back when answer was attached.

> So it doesn't help: you need to get more into detail and describe OL
> versions your friends are using, some details about the events and iTIP
> messages would be helpful, too. All this typically leads to a filed bug
> to be investigated; maybe there's a regression since there've been
> changes to the iTIP subsystem. But I think you already know this.

Sure. But probably other can confirm the bug.

--eric

[Eric Valette]

On 07/11/2009 11:28, Simon Paquet wrote:

> We have one person (Philipp) who has a part-time contract with Mozilla
> Messaging to work on Calendar bugs, but with our current state of things,
> full outlook compatibility is not his highest priority. And rightfully
> so.

So one year later, you still do not get it: people will start working on
lightning on their paid time work when the level of compatibility will
outlook calendaring will be close to sufficient. To attract developer
that can code on their normal job time, you need enterprise willing to
pay developer to iron out the last few bugs. I do not think companies
with big exchange mail server system will change the server part but
they can encourage customer to switch the cleint part especially now
that openoffice can replace M$ office for average user.

> If you want something fixed, step up, learn to code and do it. This is an
> open source project. We're more than happy to take fixes from whoever
> provides them.

I have no free personnal time to do this as I do not need this feature
at home and I'm more interested in multimedia project like xbmc or
mplayer. My employer will not allow me do it either as 98% or the 100k+
person company use windows for office work.

-- eric

[Daniel Boelzle [:dbo]]

Hi Eric,

the iMIP message is still attached as it always has been; it's iMIP. But
since the last overhaul, OL should recognize the iMIP message right away
or may even modify the calendar silently (customizable in OL AFAIK).

Please don't write me or the ml, write a bug and attach anon data to it.

bests,
Daniel

[Eric Valette]

On 07/11/2009 22:43, Daniel Boelzle [:dbo] wrote:
> Hi Eric,
>
> the iMIP message is still attached as it always has been; it's iMIP.

By attached I mean opening the compose window with the response attached.

> But
> since the last overhaul, OL should recognize the iMIP message right away
> or may even modify the calendar silently (customizable in OL AFAIK).

Does not work for my co-workers. Given the number of people, its not a
paricular install but all

>
> Please don't write me or the ml, write a bug and attach anon data to it.

Will try do it on monday.

-- eric

[Pascal]

>> With 1.0 (as well as 0.9 BTW), there is no way to get anything that
>> outlook can open. I keep having remarks from collegues that I just send
>> garbage to their invitation. selecting or not the outlook compatible
>> button does not change anything.

Do you have a link to a bugzilla issue ?

> We have one person (Philipp) who has a part-time contract with Mozilla
> Messaging to work on Calendar bugs, but with our current state of things,
> full outlook compatibility is not his highest priority. And rightfully
> so.

I would propose that people vote (or not) for the Bugzilla issue. Then
we can see if this issue should have a higher priority or not.

I personally think that Exchange/Outlook interoperability would
tremendously help TB's popularity in enterprise environments.

Pascal

[Eric Valette]

On 08/11/2009 13:41, Pascal wrote:

> I would propose that people vote (or not) for the Bugzilla issue. Then
> we can see if this issue should have a higher priority or not.

Dunno if things have changed but that did not help in the past because
independently of the vote, developers have their own interest and
usually prefer adding fancy features rather than making things simply
work (especially if it is compatibility with M$ de facto but
undocumented standard). I can understand this because they are all
volunteers after all.

> I personally think that Exchange/Outlook interoperability would
> tremendously help TB's popularity in enterprise environments.

So do I. Other have also expressed the same interest in the past but
this did not help. Or we should have a really high score this time.

Will probably open a new bug with test case Monday when back at work.

-- eric

[Nathan Tuggy]

On 2009-11-08 04:41, Pascal wrote:
>>> With 1.0 (as well as 0.9 BTW), there is no way to get anything that
>>> outlook can open. I keep having remarks from collegues that I just send
>>> garbage to their invitation. selecting or not the outlook compatible
>>> button does not change anything.
>
> Do you have a link to a bugzilla issue ?

I /believe/ that would be
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=433848 and
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=377761. Eric, can you confirm?

If that's correct, my feeling would be that the original bug (377761)
should be reopened with the given testcases, and a comment that this
seems to have regressed. Presumably, it shouldn't be too hard to fix,
since it was marked resolved and verified for 0.9 (I think?).

433848 seems to be a somewhat separate issue, mostly having to do with
lacking a UI for editing event details on confirmation, etc.

Follow-up set to m.d.a.calendar.

[Eric Valette]

On 07/11/2009 22:43, Daniel Boelzle [:dbo] wrote:

> Hi Eric,
>
> the iMIP message is still attached as it always has been; it's iMIP. But
> since the last overhaul, OL should recognize the iMIP message right away
> or may even modify the calendar silently (customizable in OL AFAIK).

Done. Its not as complete as I would like but still it has data in it.

<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=527441>

So the main complains remain:
- When outlook compatibility checkbox is unchecked; outlook
2000/2002/2003 see an attachment displayed as an ics file. You need to
click on it to produce an action on the organizer agenda and this
required accepting to update when exiting the windows that has been
opened as the result of the click,
- When checked, for simple case it works, I'm still waiting for more
complex use cases with mailing list and attachment where is still does
not work,
- There is still not way to add any information for reason to refuse an
invitation or attach a file,
- outlook 2007 does not understand the message sent whith box checked.
I'm not even sure it works at all,
- How do I distinguish between outlook version when replying. I receive
both outlook 2007 and outlook 2003 invitation (in fact for 2003 its
exchange server via CDO API),

-- eric