For those of us who are warriors of the Information Age, we use the email and calendar applications like a sword and shield. For the apps, the usual suspects include Microsoft with MS Outlook and Google with Gmail and Google Calendar (gCal). Because I do much of my work on Linux, I cannot use MS Outlook, or any other Microsoft-based app for that matter. My primary browser is Mozilla Firefox, and Mozilla’s second-most popular application is the Thunderbird email app.

One of the reasons why Firefox is very popular is because of the vast amount of useful plugins (my favorites include AdBlock, Screen Grab, Read It Later, and PicLens). Thunderbird also has a library of useful plugins, and one that I recently tried out is Lightning. One of the commonly cited drawbacks of Thunderbird was that it had no calendar feature, but Lightning addresses this shortcoming by integrating the Mozilla Sunbird calendar app into Thunderbird.

I’ve been following the Sunbird project for a while, and although the earlier versions did not impress me, the current version (v0.7) has shown much improvements to the point that I am now a user. Having a separate email and calendar app is tedious though, but the Lightning plugin takes care of that.

I Sync, Therefore I Am
I mentioned in an earlier post that having multiple calendars over-complicated my organizing system. My PDA uses the Pocket Outlook version, and this calendar is my primary one. However, I sync up with my Google Calendar for a couple of reasons: (1) it serves as my backup/emergency online calendar, and (2) it helps to sync my Outlook to Lightning.

Although my primary calendar is my PDA’s Pocket Outlook, my primary inbox is with Thunderbird, which made trying to manage my schedule between my email inbox and my PDA calendar a bit inefficient. Having a combined email/calendar app was something Outlook had for a long time, so the Thunderbird/Lightning combo isn’t earth-shattering news to the staunch Outlook users. However, for those who are considering Thunderbird or are currently using it, Lightning is a must-have. Lightning has streamlined my email/calendar management.

The Setup
The following is how I sync my different calendars (Lifehacker has various methods to sync Google Calendar with many different calendar tools as well):

• Sync Outlook with Google Calendar: I use the free version of SyncMyCal to sync up Outlook with Google Calendar. I am currently considering upgrading to the paid version as well.
• Alternatively, a free open-source software (FOSS) called Remote Calendar is available that does something similar.
• Sync Lightning with Google Calendar: Lightning is synced up to Google Calendar using the Provider plugin (thanks to this Lifehacker article for helping me find out about this add-on). Installation instructions can be found here.
• An alternative to Provider is GCalDaemon, which works for Lightning as well as other calendar apps such as iCal.

The setup works pretty well. To demonstrate, I created an event on Google Calendar, and a separate event on Lightning. Here’s proof that syncing was successful on Lightning:

… as well on Google Calendar…

… and afterwards syncing Outlook to Google Calendar was also a success.