Today I learned about Spicebird, an open source Mozilla-based collaboration application. The application is developed by the Indian company Synovel Technologies, and is based on Thunderbird, Sunbird/Lightning and SamePlace.

spicebird

Spicebird is still in an early stage of development, it’s current release is only v0.4. But having said that a lot of features is already implemented, and the application is ready to use. The developers have also published a roadmap, with quite a few interesting planed features:

  • Blogs as Email (Thunderbird addon/Spicebird built-in)
    • Post to blogs just as you send mails to your friends
    • See comments as replies to your mail
  • Instant Messaging
    • UI improvements to make is as easy as typical IM application
    • Store IM conversations
    • Home screen applet for buddy list
    • Better chat window
  • Integration with a CMS (Drupal)
  • Document management
  • Microsoft Exchange connector
  • A more meaningful address book
    • Last conversation/chat with a contact

I must say that the roadmap includes a lot of features that I really am looking forward to. My big question when having tried and perhaps started to use Spicebird, is what about MailCo? Will these two projects work together? Another question is, do we need MailCo?

I have a few suggestions for functionality that should be added to the roadmap:

  1. The installer should search for Thunderbird settings and if you want to import your mails, addresses and settings, as I guess many of your users will be previous Thunderbird users.
  2. The configuration tool that runs the first time you start, let you choose to set up a Gmail account, but why not rather let the user write in his/her Google account name and password. Spicebird could then check what Google services you are using, gmail, gtalk and gcal etc. and ask which of the services the user would like to configure to use with this application.
  3. Use online maps in the address book, Yahoo Maps or Google Maps. A small map (for instance 240×320 pixels or user defined for export to phones like iPhone) should be part of the address card.
  4. Work with developers of Firefox Microformat plugin developers, so that address information on a webpage can be easily imported, also with map information.
  5. Auto-detection of SSL and TLS for the e-mail client.
  6. Add STARTTLS support in the IM client.

If any of the Spicebird devs should stumble upon this blog entry, surprise me please!

And WOW, this is blog entry number 400!!!