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SOGo integrates well with the Mozilla suite. Sunbird provides a complete client-side calendaring application, and Lightning provides a calendaring extension to Thunderbird. Combining Lightning and Thunderbird results in a complete PIM solution for managing e-mail, calendars (events and tasks) and contacts efficiently.

To connect the Mozilla PIM suite to SOGo, first install and configure Mozilla Thunderbird to use the IMAP protocol. Then, download the latest releases of Lightning and the SOGo Connector extension. From Thunderbird's Tools menu, choose the Add-ons option, and install the extensions you just downloaded. Restart Thunderbird to activate the extensions.

The next step is to configure Lightning's CalDAV connector. From Thunderbird's File menu, choose New→Calendar, and create a network calendar of type CalDAV. Specify the appropriate URL to connect to your SOGo server. Usually, it should be http://localhost/SOGo/dav/<username>/Calendar/personal/. Next, configure the SOGo Connector for Thunderbird. From the Address Book's File menu, choose New→Remote Address Book. Give your address book a name, and as the URL, specify something like http://localhost/SOGo/dav/<username>/Contacts/personal/.

You also can use the shared address book provided by SOGo (which uses your LDAP server, named Corporate Directory) from Thunderbird. To do so, repeat the procedure to create a remote address book, but as the URL, specify http://localhost/SOGo/dav/<username>/Contacts/public/ and check Read Only.

Once completed, your personal calendar and address book are now fully synchronized with SOGo. Events, tasks, contacts or e-mail are now accessible from either SOGo's Web interface or from Mozilla Thunderbird/Lightning.

Figure 2 shows SOGo's Web interface with one personal and one shared calendar. Figure 3 shows the same information, but using the Thunderbird and Lightning extension.

Figure 2. SOGo as Seen from a Web Browser

Figure 3. SOGo as Seen from Thunderbird and Lightning

Although SOGo's Web interface allows you to access all information from virtually any computer connected to the Internet, some power users need access from their mobile devices, such as cellular phones or personal digital assistants. Supporting the plethora of devices out there is almost impossible, but the SyncML standard finally emerged as an efficient protocol for synchronizing PIM-related information between your mobile devices and groupware platform.

Funambol, formerly known as Sync4j, is middleware that sits between a groupware server and SyncML-capable devices. Luckily for SOGo, a native connector is available for Funambol. This plugin lets you connect the middleware to SOGo, so users can synchronize their contacts, events and tasks with the SOGo server.

Mobiles devices require a SyncML client to synchronize data through Funambol. Most cellular phones have a built-in client, but PDAs or smartphones lack one. The recommended clients are as follows:

There also are clients for other applications, such as Microsoft Outlook. The latter allows you to synchronize contacts, events and tasks fully with SOGo through the Funambol middleware.

Figure 4 shows a PalmOS-based device insync with our SOGo server.

Figure 4. SOGo from a PDA

Whenever you're replacing an existing solution with a new one, data migration is a must for your users. Because SOGo stores its data directly using the iCalendar and vCard standards, migration is relatively easy if the legacy system speaks the same language.

For example, in Microsoft Exchange, you can obtain data from it through WebDAV. If you are trying to use a simple WebDAV client, such as cadaver, however, you will not be able to obtain the data, as the client does not specify in its requests a required HTTP header. You need to set the HTTP translate header to false if you want to obtain the data from the Microsoft Exchange server. Using wget, if you do:

wget --user=ludovic --password=***** --header "Translate: f" 
↪http://exchange/Exchange/ludovic/Calendar/foo.EML