Zybert Help

Lightning Calendar

This article covers installing and subscribing to Mozilla Lightning Calendars. Lightning is an Add On for the email client Mozilla Thunderbird. This article does not cover using Thunderbird or installing an Add On. For help on these subjects please refer to the links below.

Home of Mozilla.org Mozilla Org
Thunderbird email client Thunderbird Homepage
Lightning is a Calendar add on for Thunderbird Lightning Home Page

Clicking on the Mail and Calendar icons, switches between the two applications.

To Create a Calendar

Each user already has a calendar called 'main.ics' which will show when Lightning is installed. To create a new calendar:

Go to File
New...
Calender...

Then choose On the network and Next >

Then iCalendar (ICS)
http://www/cal/username/calendarname.ics where username is the name of the user on the GEM server and calendarname is whatever you want to call it. Note that calendarname.ics will be the name of the file on the server but does not necessarily have to be the name that appears on Lightning (see nickname below).
Then Next >

NOTE: Networks with more than one Zybert server may need the www substituting with the alternate server alias e.g.
http://gem/cal/username/calendarname.ics

Here you can choose a nickname for the calendar you named above. For example the calendarname may have been entered as deptmanager but you may wish this calendar to show up as Jane within Lightning. You can also click the Color button to choose a colour for this user's entries.

Finally you will have a message informing you Your calendar has been created
Click Finish

Subscribe to an Existing Calendar

If you wish to view another user's calendar you will need to subscribe to it. This is the same process as creating a calendar (as above) but using the calendarname.ics of the existing calendar on the server e.g. if you want to view Jane's calendar then specify deptmanager.ics in Location.

Where are the Calendars Stored?

Access rights to calendars can be modified by system administrators. By default users have read/write access to their own calendars but only read access to other users' calendars.

Using Windows Explorer, calendars are in  \\www\System\home\Common\Calendars 

Note: calendars will not show here until an entry is made in the calendar.

Group Calendars (for creating Groups refer to this article )

Each group member has write access to the whole group calendar folder

Everyone else can view these calendars in read-only mode

Create calendar as http://www/cal/[share]/[calendarname.ics]

Notes on Using Calendars

1. When you create a calendar it is not absolutely necessary to include the .ics extension, mycal is just as valid as mycal.ics. However doing so identifies the file as a calendar file and archived calendars can be removed using Archive Management by specifying *.ics with the appropriate parameters.
2. To rename a calendar right click it and choose Properties. Change the calendar name and click OK. This changes the name you see in your calendar (the Nickname) but the original calendar name remains the same on the server.
3. To delete a calendar right click on it and choose Delete Calendar. This will delete it from your list of calendar names but will not delete it from the server. This prevents a user from deleting a calendar that may be in use by others. Deleting a calendar completely, requires an administrator to delete the file from the server.
4. Moving through the months by clicking on the Right and Left arrow heads on the small month calendar on the top left, does not change the large calendar on the right. Clicking on a specific date on the small calendar, does go to that day on the large calendar.
5. On the menu items at the top go to Tools... Options... where you can set various parameters to your personal preference. Such as, day start and end time, time zone, default settings for alarms and lots more.
6. Having created an Event, you can drag the top or bottom to increase its duration, or drag it to another day/time on the calendar.