Microsoft Exchange data provider for Thunderbird Lightning

The xdata-provider Lightning addon allows you to use Microsoft Exchange calendars in Thunderbird, via Exchange's web services. The addon works both on Thunderbird 2 and 3, though support for Thunderbird 3 is largely untested.

Features

• Creating, modifying, deleting calendar items.
• Inviting attendees to meetings and sending meeting requests.
• Free/Busy information when inviting other Exchange users to meetings.
• Notifications for meeting requests
• Configuration autodiscovery

Download releases

• Microsoft Exchange calendar provider 0.3. For Thunderbird 2 and 3. Released on 16/06/09. MD5: f0e9e7c04c039bfe9eac110cb6501ead.

Usage and documentation

The format of the calendar URL is http://your@email.com@auto for autodiscovering configuration, or replace auto with the full path to the Exchange web services SOAP endpoint.

1. Calendar / New calendar
2. On the network / next
3. Microsoft exchange. In the location type either:
   • http://youremail@provider.com@auto for autoconfiguration
   • https://youremail@provider.com@exchangeserver.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx for manual settings
   where youremail@provider.com is your Exchange username.

Not supported (yet)

• Managing meeting responses.
  Various documentation states that meeting responses should be automatically processed by Exchange. In our test environment this did not occur. (Perhaps the functionality was switched off.) Nevertheless, Outlook's "process requests and responses on arrival" e-mail tracking option will spot meeting responses in the inbox and update relevant calendar items. With Exchange's web services, it is possible to scan the inbox for IPM.Schedule.Meeting.Resp messages, and obtain the relevant AssociatedCalendarItemId. Unfortunately it is impossible to modify the ResponseType of Attendees, despite a successful operatoin result on attempt. Perhaps there is a way to do it with Response Objects but there did not seem to be an obvious way.
• Tasks. You can always create a "task" as a calendar item though.
• A bunch of other stuff.

Errata and caveats

1. Colors of categories aren't synchronized. (Could be done via extended properties.)
2. Lightning's "chair" user isn't hooked up, and neither Exchange's "resources". Perhaps these two could be mapped, though it could confuse users.
3. Notify later is mapped to tentative accept. Exchange's decline causes item to be deleted, though this doesn't usually occur with Lightning. The view needs to be manually refreshed to show new attendence status, if changed.
4. Lightning's parser messes up with commas in Attendee names, when doing the free/busy stuff. Commas are translated into semicolons in the frontend to work around this, until Lightning is fixed
5. If an invitation is accepted, the view must be refreshed prior to editing the accepted event. (Occurs when you're looking at the day when the event will occur, when you accept the invitation, and then edit the new event.)

Contact and support