Lightning + Gcal provider + Google Calendar

Almost all my events are tracked in Google Calendar: my personal events, my wife's appointments, the kids school schedule, the soccer games, tech events in the Bay Area, Google developer events and of course birthdays. Specific calendars are shared with my friends and family. Everybody is in-synch ;)

I like the Google Calendar interface. The most useful feature beyond sharing calendars is the SMS notification.

I also use Thunderbird and was looking to tie it all together. Using Lightning and the GCal provider, I now can synchronize my calendars (in an open way). The setup is very simple. Here are the pieces that make up the solution:

1. Mozilla Lightning for Mozilla Thunderbird 2
2. Provider for Google Calendar
3. Instructions on how to synchronize with Google Calendar or LifeHacker instructions
   

Alternatively, LifeHacker documents another solution, which looks much more complicated to set up.

Image: courtesy of LifeHacker