Rated 4 out of 5 stars

by Danilo Fortunato on July 8, 2007 · permalink

I tested ".vcs Support" version 0.4.1 with Mozilla Sunbird 0.5 on Windows XP SP2 and on openSUSE 10.2 Linux.

This extension fills an important gap in Sunbird and Lightning, providing full support to vCalendar format (.vcs files).
The user interface is very simple and intuitive, and supports language localization.
I was able to install the extension without problems.

The extension can export almost all the properties of an event, plus some internals fields, not visible in the user interface.
Only priority and URL fields are not exported (I don't know if they are part of vCalendar standard or not).
Date and time fields are exported in local time (not UTC time).

I tested the export feature, trying to export three different calendars to vCalendar format and importing them into the Calendar of Microsoft Works 7.0 on Windows XP, and into Kontact 1.2.3 (KOrganizer 3.5.5 module) on openSUSE 10.2 Linux.
One of these calenders was a test calendar designed to test all the properties of an event.

The import into the Calendar of Microsoft Works worked pretty well, with some issues related to alarms (they are set 1 hour more) and recurrent events (recurrence information is ignored, if you choose to export recurrent events as single events).

On openSUSE Linux, the extension has a user interface bug with the Italian version of Sunbird (the export calendar dialog does not contain any calendar), but works fine with the English version of Sunbird.
The import into Kontact worked pretty well, with some issues related to all day events (that are not imported) and alarms (events are imported, but the alarm part is ignored).

The extension has been constantly improved since version 0.1, and the author has proved to be responsive on notifications of bugs.

All tests were done on a clean Sunbird profile.
All operating systems and software are in Italian language.