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Software Operating Systems Windows

Writable Contact Lists With Outlook and LDAP? 39

Posted by Cliff from the hacking-in-the-write-perms dept.
Snafoo asks: "Ximian Evolution allows users to set up LDAP-based shared contact lists, to which multiple users can read and write. However, my company uses MS Outlook 2002, which doesn't support writing to LDAP directories. Currently, we use a kludgy PHP front-end to the LDAP directory for entering new addresses. Short of buying Exchange, is there anything we can do to share write-enabled contact lists with LDAP and Outlook?"
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Writable Contact Lists With Outlook and LDAP? More

Writable Contact Lists With Outlook and LDAP?

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  • Write a plugin for Outlook (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Kj0n ( 245572 ) on Friday May 09, 2003 @06:01AM (#5917298)
    Can't you write a plugin for Outlook that synchronizes the local address book (or a subfolder of it) with the LDAP directory?

    Disadvantage: the contacts are also present in the address book of Outlook.

    Advantage: the contacts are always available, even when the LDAP directory is not accessible (interesting for travelling users).
    • Kj0n your sig points to you! You need to check yourself! Please allow me to enlighten you all on the Monopolistic capabilities of Microsoft. I am a developer of a CRM Web Based Application, and have done extensive r&d on this topic. We need to create an addin for outlook that will synchronize our product with Outlook. Microsoft has (they say due to viruses) implimented an Outlook security model that blocks access to relevant items ie: email addresses, message senders, the address books, from programatic
      • There is another way! Use Outlook Redemption [dimastr.com]. This COM object does all the Extended MAPI stuff for you and is very easy to use. I have used it from VB 6 and also C#. This guy also has another tool on his site called Outlook Spy which is pretty handy.
        • No way, I "trust" bill more than some anonymous guy that wrote a locked(no source) free VB = crap app, that has a laundry list of problems. For proof check the outlook addins news group. For all you know every email address read by Redemption could be sold to bigpimp@somepornsites.com....
          • It would be very easy to tell if the COM object was passing email addresses back to the "mothership", just do some traffic sniffing, that's simple. Besides, how many of us actually read every line of source code for the open source apps that we use? Not many I would bet.

            Redemption is not written in VB it is written in C++ (not that it really matters). I haven't had any real problems with it. Most of the people I have run across trying to write addins for Outlook or apps to interact with it were frankly, no

            • The supported languages for redemption are vb, vba, vbscript (I re-read my previous message I see where you get that I appologize.) Please elaborate on the usage of this with c# then I would love to hear how the performance was, and that you have solved the memory leak problems I have read about. Perhapse you can make me convert like you appear to be.
              • Since Redemption is COM, you can use it from C# (or any .Net language) by using COM Interop. If you are using Visual Studio .Net, it is as simple as adding a reference to the "SafeOutlook Library" to your project. Otherwise you need to use the tlbimp.exe utility to do it.

                As for memory leaks, I'm not sure about that. You do need to cleanup after Outlook and Redemption very well though. When I first started using it in .Net, I was sloppy because I was used to the CLR cleaning up objects after they go out of

                • Mark, Thanks for the additional information. Although I still have some performance doubts, I would have less apprehention if Dmitry watched the news groups. Was the support sufficent? Also in my orig. message I included a link that tested fine, but was removed.. here is it again: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url = /library/en-us/dno2k3ta/html/odc_olsecnotescomaddi ns.asp Outlook Security for 2003 [microsoft.com] This link outlines the security in the 2003 beta, but that is all still subject to change. Ho
                  • He's been pretty helpful whenever we have needed it. It's all been through email. I would guess that he may not have the time to monitor the newsgroups all the time. He has a "day job". If you build your app against the lowest version of Outlook you want to be compatable with, it should also work with later versions. We build our product against Outlook 2K and it works with 2K, XP and 2003 Beta. As for performance, I am not doing a lot of stuff at one time, so maybe I just don't notice it. Most of our Outlo
          • Boy, you are an agry little one, aren't you?

  • seems obvious, but... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by cyborch ( 524661 ) on Friday May 09, 2003 @06:28AM (#5917359) Homepage Journal

    why not change to evolution? It looks exactly like outlook, and if you don't use excange features anyway, then why not simply use the product that meets your demands instead of one that is made by microsoft?

    I'm not trolling. I'm serious. Why do people choose to use MS products when there are alternatives out there, that will meet their demands?

    I usually try to use the best tool for the job - not the "I have a hammer, therefore all my problems are a nail" solution.

    • Snafoo didn't specify how large his company is. do you really want to rollout a new app to 30-50-100+ people? If its possible to find a short term solution, then Snafoo could slowly change everybody over to Evolution. Arbitrarily changing to a new mail client (even with compatibility tests) is going to make waves and reduce efficiency. There are very few sacred things in the corporate world, and e-mail has become one of them.

      People use MS products because they're already there and they mostly work. if is th

    • I'm guessing Evolution wasn't considered because Evolution only runs on Linux/UNIX.

      (The original poster didn't make it clear which OS his company uses, but it seems pretty improbably that everyone at his company uses Outlook 2002 on WINE/Linux)

      • Im sorry, it never occured to me that noone had made a windows port of evolution... with cygwin (or some of the other linux->win32 kits) it should be very possible tho...

        • Yeah, I know; it comes as a perennial shock to me as well. BTW, I've even tried the cygwin route, but the sales staff has problems with the lack of integration w/ the rest of the desktop. (Even cut/paste is fux0red.)Y'know, if Ximian came out with a commercial version of Evolution, ported to Windows, I think I could get TPTB to buy this.

    • Probably the whole thing with Evolution not being available for Windows.

      (Much to my Dismay, I like Mozilla mail, but I'd love to have a fully Open-Source and Cross-Platform PIM... and no Mozilla Calendar just isn't there yet in terms of features and stability)
    • Here is the real world. That's why people doesn' use alternatives. Sometimes, it's not just a question of technique. It's a question that the user doesn't want to change. Or there is thousands of machine running a bad M$ application that doesn't compensate to change it all just for a little detail.

  • Hard lessons (Score:4, Insightful)

    by walt-sjc ( 145127 ) on Friday May 09, 2003 @06:31AM (#5917362)
    Yeah, I admit that this is somewhat of a flamebait, (but so was the original /. question) but that's the problem with closed source and a abusive monopoly. If MS had been forced to open all API's and file formats like some of us were hoping, you wouldn't be having this problem.

    For some strange reason, people think that Outlook is a stand-alone product. This is somewhat true, but you (like the poster found out) lose most of the compelling features if you fail to use Exchange. Look mom! I have a shirt with no pants!

    Some people will probably point out that you may be able to use OpenMail or Insight Server (Insight Connector?), but these are also expensive products that don't fully integrate with Outlook either. If you are going to go high-end commercial, you might as well go with exchange (but put the damn thing behind a firewall / UNIX mail relay server fer christs sakes.)

    Of course typing "shared outlook contact lists" in google comes up with a page with lots of info [slipstick.com] on the subject, but I didn't see anything that exactly matched the poster's requirements. Lot's of kludgy stuff, mostly commercial, all trying to make the closed source pile of crap a little more usable.
    • I remembered an article on setting up a server to replace exchange in a Linux Journal a couple months back, and sure enough it used Insight Server which like the parent mentioned is expensive. But if you are interested here is the link http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6734 [linuxjournal.com]

    • Yeah, I admit that this is somewhat of a flamebait, (but so was the original /. question) but that's the problem with closed source and a abusive monopoly. If MS had been forced to open all API's and file formats like some of us were hoping, you wouldn't be having this problem.

      Not so much flamebait as redundant. Or maybe Offtopic. Understand, I happen to totally agree with you. But so do most other Slashdotters. And those that don't agree are probably familiar with your arguments. We've all argued over th

    • First of all he is deploying it in a business enviornment and insightserver/connector is just not that expensive compared to exchange in this kind of environment. It's much much cheaper than exchange which is why I have deployed insight server many times.
  • ...using addressbook and OS X server.

    --Mike
      1. AddressBook does not allow you to update LDAP
      2. AddressBook stores it's information in binary files, and can only export to vCard

      So, any information that you enter into AddressBook will not be accessible to other machines over LDAP, unless you use something like the horde as a front-end to a LDAP server, and then manually import your vCards. This is the same problem as the first post in the thread. Back to square one! Apple expects us to buy a subscription to .Mac and use iSync to share addressbooks. N

  • Mozilla? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Kiaser Zohsay ( 20134 ) on Friday May 09, 2003 @09:09AM (#5917918)
    Mozilla Mail/Minotaur/Thunderbird has LDAP support, and the Mozilla LDAP SDK supports write access, so it might actually work. I have used Mozilla Mail as my primary email client since April of 2000 (M15 or so) but not with LDAP. Try it, it just might work.

    • Re:Mozilla? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Bazzargh ( 39195 )
      I just got moz-exchange LDAP access to our server working. Dunno if its write access, but generally its the company address book we share, not personal address books.

      This tip really helped. [google.com]

      I downloaded and started up the Softerra LDAP browser [softerra.com], typed in the name of my server and asked it to search for base DNs (I assume this is what the 'find' button is for in the moz setup that is never enabled). I used my normal login name and password for the domain as the User DN and password (no 'DOMAIN\User' nonsen
    • The answer to that is that they don't want to make all their users change email clients. But the answer to that is that Outlook has so many security issues, they need to change anyway.
  • I'm ignorant of Evolution's groupware capabilities so this is probably a silly question. Our Exchange users extensively use not only shared address books but also shared folders. There is gigabytes of information stored in the shared folders. Most of it contains email messages but much is also the other Outlook/Exchange objects, like appointments, address book entries(?), and little calendars.

    What can these people use that is open source, from client to server? I'd like to hear an answer from someone w
    • http://www.bynari.net InsightServer works with Outlook clients, supports shared folders and the like.
    • It's not open source or free, but Ximian's Evolution Connector works for shared folders now. I use it mainly for the calendaring stuff, but normal email / contacts seem to work too.
      • Does this still require an Exchange server? I just don't want to have Exchange anymore. I want a new service that provides the shared folders and address books. It is prohibitively expensive to upgrade from Windows NT and the version of Exchange we already use. We want something cheaper that works and so far it is not Exchange server.

        Kris
    • I'd actually recommend against using shared folders in Outlook. I used to work in an environment that used them, and they were nice in many ways. But they use up a lot of storage in the Exchange database, which can slow down your server.

      Also, the the data wasn't really as secure as it would be on an actual file system. If something were deleted you couldn't just go to a tape backup and find the file, because old copies of it were stuck in Microsoft's proprietary database.

      • Hmm that is interesting. We do actually get pop-ups every now and then that say "The Exchange server is too busy to process your request. Please try again later." This is in an office of only 35 people.

        Kris

  • Pointer & Suggestions (Score:3, Informative)

    by maggard ( 5579 ) <michael@michaelmaggard.com> on Friday May 09, 2003 @11:15AM (#5918926) Homepage Journal
    Slipstick.com [slipstick.com] is an invaluable Outlook/Exchange site. It has a good-sized page [slipstick.com] of alternatives to Exchange for address book sharing and another page [slipstick.com] just about LDAP.

    As I see it there are a two obvious solutions:

    • Use a central locked-down PAB everyone has read-access to. Updates & additions are created by users as standard address book entries and sent to a designated in-house address. Every so often in the off hours all of those files are collected and dropped into the master file (can be scripted.) Benefits are the address-book entries contain all of the Outlook set of details, will work with 3rd-party add-ins.

    • Or instead of using a "kludgy PHP front-end" use a better-quality one like Twiki or Horde. If with this you move your mailboxes over to IMAP you'll have also gotten a great remote-client solution. On their desktops they can use Outlook, away from them log into the webmail client, and also use it for those shared address-book updates.
    By the way, a good utility for exporting from Outlook/Exchange to vCard and vCalendar files (individual files or multiple-entry files) is the free Outpod [stoer.de]. Written for exporting to Apple iPods it is also an easy way to transfer around address books to many applications.
  • From aldap [freshmeat.net] on freshmeat.

    " aldap is designed as a groupware, Web-based, central contact manager. It can supplement end-users' personal address books or stand alone. It includes Perl scripts to create an empty LDAP tree ready for data entry, or if you have an existing Outlook contact database, import them easily. Its features include Add Organizational Units, Add entry, Search, View, Print, Modify, Delete, VCard export, Outlook conversion tools, plenty of end user help, and more."

    As the creator of aldap I

  • and it has a corba application that sync contacts in outlook to your contacts on the openexchange server.
  • Bynari's Insight Server/plugin does this.
  • Try HTMLize and look at the instructions. I think the process can be improved much, but here's a good start!

    http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macos x/ 17303

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