Today’s topics include Mozilla focusing on its Thunderbird email client, and Microsoft unveiling and updating SharePoint web parts for users.
Mozilla is renewing focus on its Thunderbird email client after pulling much of the focus and funding for the project back in July 2012.
According to Ryan Sipes, community manager for the Thunderbird project, there are currently eight full-time staff working on Thunderbird. However, over the course of 2019 the plan is to add up to six additional staff members, who will be engineering personnel working on making Thunderbird faster and easier to use.
Among the items that Mozilla’s Thunderbird staff will work on in 2019 are efforts to improve the notification system to better integrate with native operating system notification systems.
Better support for integrating with Gmail is also part of the 2019 plan, as is improving the integration of email encryption technology.
Developers and users of Microsoft’s SharePoint web-based collaboration and document management platform can now choose from a wide range of new and updated SharePoint web parts that can be used to communicate information within businesses and to customers and partners.
Mark Kashman, a senior product manager for the SharePoint team, said, “SharePoint web parts in Office 365 are the building blocks of your pages and sites.”
New web parts include an interactive Yammer experience integrated within SharePoint, a My Recent Documents tool, a My Frequent Sites web part, Microsoft Stream now allowing sorting choices and mobile embedded playback capabilities, embedded Youtube videos, a countdown timer, a quick chart component, a code snippet web part and a markdown web part, which is a plain text formatting syntax.