My free/busy work on the vCalendar plugin was motivated by the fact the manager at work wanted to be able to get engineers’ availability more easily on his Outlook. As two of them used Sylpheed-Claws already, a few others Evolution or Kontact, and the rest Thunderbird, I worked a bit on the plugin to make it work better in this regard. I’ve declared Thunderbird unsupported at work, because Sunbird or whatever it is named is completely not ready nor usable.

After that, Thunderbird users at work had to migrate to either to Evo, Kontact or Sylpheed-Claws, and they all chose Sylpheed-Claws — I wonder why! So I assisted them in the migration process, and have been able to find out some bugs in vCalendar, which I fixed today. Thanks to Aleksandar Urosevic for his tbird2syl.py script!
In the process I added a better free/busy checking when creating a meeting, although with no groovy gradients, and made the whole stuff much more usable.

Here’s how it looks like to create a meeting with latest CVS, with one people busy, one available and another with no info published. When you hover over the status icons, you get suggestions for other possible meetings times, if possible in the next or previous 6 hours.