After trying Kolab and Kontact as a groupware solution, I decided to see if I could come up with a simpler way to share contacts and calendars involving Thunderbird.

I had hoped that simply giving several users read/write access to the same address book would work. According to this bug report, it doesn't.

I was then lead to discover SyncKolab, along with the Calendar extension for Thunderbird.

The Calendar extension provides basically the same functionality as Sunbird, but integrates a little more directly with Thunderbird. So far, so good.

SyncKolab as was easy to install, and really depends only a shared IMAP folder to work, rather than the whole massive Kolab server. Once I realized I needed to add a button for it to the toolbar, it worked fine sync'ing contacts.

There appeared to be a bug with sync'ing calendars, though. It simply wasn't detecting that any events had been added to my calendar that needed sync'ing. It appears to be the same bug that somone else ran into several months ago, with no response. Not really confidence inspiring.

I'm left with a sense that a simple and workable contact and calendar sharing solution is out there, and it may involve Thunderbird, but this isn't it.

Perhaps as the Lightening project picks up steam, so will the interest in this kind of project.