Paul Johnson wrote:
On Thu, 2009-08-13 at 11:48 +0530, Mihira Fernando wrote:On Thursday 13 August 2009 11:16:31 am Paul Johnson wrote:What would the best way to go about setting up a server to manage such contacts?Zimbra ? www.zimbra.comOverkill...granted I'd like the other features, but I'm trying to follow the "do one thing at a time and do one thing well" philosophy of software design that a comprehensive, one-size-fits-all package doesn't necessarily allow.
The classical answer is OpenLDAP, which I do use, but I'm not really happy with. I run it only as an address book, and as you say, it's massive overkill. But it does do LDAP well, and though it's a bit of a resource hog (in Linux server terms, not desktop or Windows) it's well-behaved and completely unobtrusive once configured.
What I'd really like is a small program which accepted just the simple LDAP requests that email clients use, and turned the queries into SQL lookups. In other words, a tiny, tiny subset of OpenLDAP. I look for this every now and then, but I haven't found one, and I don't have the time to learn enough system programming to make one.
The main drawback to LDAP is that the address book has to be regarded as read-only: email clients can't edit or create new entries (yet). Even with Outlook and Exchange in a heavily integrated Windows Server network this is the case. I made a couple of brutally primitive perl web pages to do this, and if I needed to do it more than two or three times a year, I might make something a bit more sophisticated. On the odd occasion I've needed to do quite a bit of hacking I've used a full LDAP editor.
-- Joe