As an avid user of Thunderbird, my only serious complaint is it’s lack of a calendaring solution, which forces me to still use Outlook for my appointments and such. Now it appears that Mozilla is getting ready to roll in features from Sunbird, the Mozilla calendaring application, with the hopes of being able to battle Outlook for use in corporate settings. The codename of this new project to integrate the mail and calendar features is called Lightning.

This may not be completely far-fetched if Mozilla can make the calendaring feature interact with PDAs and communication servers such as Microsoft Exchange. According to a News.com article, one company has already installed Thunderbird on 44,000 desktops as their corporate standard. Microsoft continues to say that it’s not worried…but it should be.