Lightning and Office 365 Calendar integration
I'm working on setting up Thunderbird for a client who makes use of Office 365. I have regular email working nicely, no problems there, but I cannot get Lightning to sync up with the calendars.
As a quick side note, the links for support on the Lightning site are dead and should be removed or updated ('Get Support' at http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/projects/calendar/). The 'Support Site' link at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/thunderbird/addon/lightning/ is a read-only blog. Not exactly a support site at all.
Procedure I'm following is basically what's found at http://it.ucmerced.edu/node/402.
When I reach Step 14, nothing happens. Autodiscover hangs indefinitely, no errors, no results. I contacted and worked with Microsoft already, they provided the following URLs, none of which worked:
- https://outlook.office365.com/ews/exchange.asmx - https://m.outlook.com/ews/exchange.asmx - (and one more which is more specific to the organization, omitted for privacy)
Same deal as autodiscover-- no errors, no prompts, just sits there (have waited over a half hour on test machines).
Office 365 is incredibly common, I cannot be the only one attempting this configuration recently.
Windows 7, latest Thunderbird, latest Lightning, and the latest add-on from http://www.1st-setup.nl/wordpress/?page_id=133. I realize the add-on is a bit old, which might be my problem but I'd like some corroboration.
Has anyone out there successfully configured Lightning to work with their Microsoft hosted O365 calendars? Suggestions?
Thanks much!
Ndryshuar nga thunderbirdquestionacct
Krejt Përgjigjet (6)
First, I have found zero support from Microsoft. There support people appear to be incapable of understanding that active sync is a Microsoft proprietary protocol and not everyone pays for the rights to use it. They also get very quite when caldav the open protocol is mentioned. No money in that for Microsoft so it is not even an option. Just as they resisted imap for almost 20 years.
The exchange calendar add-on just does not work with the current Thunderbird version.
So my alternative assuming OWA is offered as a part of office 365 is the davmail client would make a good intermediary. If it is an office situation, davmail can also be configured on a server http://davmail.sourceforge.net/index.html
Bummer, this is somewhat surprising (but not at all surprising) to hear. The main issue is that the client has an application which calls the mail-app so I can't substitute for just OWA. Guess they'll have to purchase some more Office licenses. Thanks for the followup.
Your misreading what I though I said.
At least I think so.
If they have OWA access, the davmail program (open source and largely funded by the French Government) , sits in the users tray and acts as a proxy to get calendar and mail if it is set to from the OWA API. So for the user perspective, once set up it appears that everything works from within Thunderbird.
I particularly like DAVMAIL for it's ability to scale and sit on a server and do the same job for a whole office full of people.
I use Exchange EWS Provider Add-on from here:
http://www.1st-setup.nl/wordpress/?page_id=133
It's recently become unsupported, which is a shame as it works well for me.
There is an item in the FAQ about setting it up with Office 365
Oops, just noticed the link in the OP. Anyway, it works for me using the manual setup option rather than autodiscovery - see the FAQ.
To update my previous post. The author of ExQuilla for Microsoft Exchange has taken over the code base for the calendar add-on. See his blog post with link to the newer version of the calendar add-on here.
The Author of this add-on is particularly active in the Thunderbird developer community.