I decided to switch to Thunderbird for a variety of reasons, and the one thing I was really missing was how to get my tasks from Outlook into Thunderbird/Lightning. The calendars were no problem as I have Outlook using the GoogleSync app from Google to keep that calendar in sync. But tasks aren't supported that way.
However, after way too much digging and surfing and tinkering, I realized that since I'm using OS X, specifically Snow Leopard, and it supports Exchange sync, the answers were built into my OS.
To get my tasks from Outlook into Thunderbird I did the following:
- I set up Apple's iCal to use our corporate Exchange2007 server for calendar and tasks
- Once that was up, I went to the Finder and looked under my home folder, Library, Calendars
- There were a couple of folders with long GUID names (long numbers/letters separated by dashes) ending in ".calendar". Expanding this showed a folder called "Events" which contained one .ics file for every task that was sync'd from Exchange
- I copied all of these .ics files to a temporary folder
- This step is optional, but I recommend it otherwise you're going to repeat the import steps for each .ics file: I then opened the terminal, changed to the folder with the .ics files, and typed "cat *.ics > merged.ics". This took each of the individual .ics files and made them into one.
- In Thunderbird I went to the Calendar page, clicked "File / Import Calendar" and browsed to the "merged.ics" file above
I wish I knew of a more cross-platform solution, but since I use OS X this worked fine for me ;-)
