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LDAP-Based Address Books for Win32? 33

Posted by Cliff from the outlook-excluded dept.
Snafoo asks: "I'm trying to replace an Access-powered communal address book at my office with something cross-platform and (preferably) LDAP-powered. Unfortunately, I can't find a single email client for windows that would allow people to update the LDAP dB from their address-book interface except, the usual suspect, Outlook. I've tried Mozilla, Eudora, and a slew of other 'freebies', but they only allow browsing; at the moment, I'm considering dropping cygwin+XFree on the desktops of the windows clients and giving them access to Evolution on a central server (God bless Ximian!), however, most of the Win32 boxen are used by non-clueful sorts who would be put out by the inconvenience of what amounts to a second desktop. Aside from shelling out $90 a seat for WinAxe, or another rootless X server for Windows, what do you all recommend?" Those interested in X-Servers for Windows may wish to check out this previous article, however if you are using an X11 server not mentioned, please feel free to recommend others, here.
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LDAP-Based Address Books for Win32? More

LDAP-Based Address Books for Win32?

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  • Why another desktop? (Score:3, Informative)

    by seanmeister ( 156224 ) on Friday August 16, 2002 @03:01PM (#4084561)

    Couldn't you simply run Evo or whatever client in the X server WITHOUT running a window manager or desktop environment? Just pass it some window geometry and let it take up the entire X server display?
    • ... on second thought, I'm thinking that might fuck up the dialogs and stuff... so why not just a minimal window manager, with no desktop stuff?
      • Or just get a rootless X server, rather than XFree (which, afaik, and it's been awhile, doesn't do rootless on Windows). There are plenty available, most quite quite inexpensive per seat licensing.

        --
        Evan (no reference)

  • What about VNC?

    While it's not seamless, it does work well, and its session state is stored on the server, so your local computer crashing won't take it down too. Plus as an added benefit, you can connect to it from other machines.

  • LDAP (Score:2, Informative)

    by GreenKiwi ( 221281 )
    I am very interested in finding a cross platform solution. I don't believe that Evolution is the way to go. Creating an LDAP server and using LDAP clients on all the different platforms is a much more elegant solution.

    I'd love to hear what others are doing.

    I know that many mail clients out there support LDAP searches, however, I haven't found any good guides to setting up the LDAP servers. If anyone has any pointers, I'd love to hear them.

    • Re:LDAP (Score:3, Informative)

      by OnyxRaven ( 9906 )
      I certainly agree. I am currently in a couple of projects now that have people across the country, across different platforms (Mac and Win2k mainly, but I use Linux at home often) and we want to be able to share a contact list for our media contacts. Right now there's no good way of doing it aside from a text listing we have on our website, which sucks in comparison to an LDAP server we could have running somewhere. This would reduce the confusion we have when we're updating the contacts list and not everyone has the contacts in their personal Outlook/Netscape/Lotus Notes/whatever contact lists.

      Any resources on this? I checked google to only small avail (though my query might have sucked).

      • I know of neither stand-alone GUI apps nor mailers that actually allow you to edit entries on the server, although most mailers now at least let you search for addresses. There are, however, several web-based apps that will let you edit. I forget all the names, but I believe SquirrelMail has a plug-in for it and there are several others on Freshmeat.

        It shouldn't be too terribly much work to write a cross-platform app in Python to allow editing and browsing of entries; I'd guess 30-40 man-hours if someone wants to fund the development.

        I've been developing a set of Perl modules and Webmin interfaces for managing users and groups, and could probably implement something for Usermin, but I've been too busy trying to make a living to work on it lately.

        There's a fair amount that goes into learning how LDAP works, understanding the ACLs, etc., but the basics of setting up a server are pretty easy. Understanding and Deploying LDAP is probably the best book out there (title might not be quite right), published by MacMillan. It's a very thick book and not very cheap, but definitely the best book I've found.

    • www.openldap.org [openldap.org] has lots of information about how to set up the openLDAP server on various platforms.

      The old Netscape (4.x) clients may do the job for you on Win* and Linux. The Mac's built-in address book is LDAP (at least in 10.2, and possibly in 10.1.x).

      iPlanet's (well, now it's SunONE) LDAP server is great if you want to spend the money, in which case spending money on the clients shouldn't be an issue as well.

  • Instead of Cygwin and Xfree to run a Unix app on a Windows (I love saying this..) dumb-terminal, use VNC! A VNC-server will read the user setup file for xwindows and create a virtual desktop using the windows manager settings of the setup file - this is where the clever bit comes in. Create your own window manager that does one and only one thing: run you specified app full screen.

    Create a vnc schortcut on your windows decktop, label it "Ximian" and when when clicked, all the user sees is "Ximian" - it just happens to be Ximian funnign full screen on a VNC X-Windows desktop.

    • Oh, I agree that VNC is great. But if all you want is one app, you want a rootless X server. That way, you can run 2 windows apps and one X app on the same desktop, at the same time. The X app behaves basically like a normal windows app. You can resize it, maximize it, minimize it, move it around, etc, using the standard Windows controls.

      Besides, you can set up a shortcut to an SSH client that automagically runs your X-app-of-choice.
      • I don't have the time to hack this modification to Xvnc, but wouldn't it be possible to change it and the viewer to be rootless?

        This would require a slight extension to the RFB protocol to be able to send window size updates at any time, as well as a client that could support multiple distinct windows. Each time an X client opens a new window, the Xvnc server would send a new geometry/window ID to the client.

        There's probably a more elegant way to do this (perhaps a control connection and multiple RFB connections, a la FTP). Just some thoughts from someone who refuses to use non-rootless X servers on Win32. :)

  • SquirrelMail (Score:4, Informative)

    by pete-classic ( 75983 ) <hutnick@gmail.com> on Friday August 16, 2002 @04:06PM (#4085100) Homepage Journal
    SquirrelMail [squirrelmail.org] is a web-based IMAP client. Among its many features are . . . LDAP address book (RW).

    You could use this for adding addresses and using your IMAP server remotely, and use any other IMAP client(s) for all other purposes.

    -Peter

  • Webpage for changes? (Score:2, Informative)

    by Finni ( 23475 )
    How about making an {Inter|Intra}net webpage that allows each user to log in and see their addressbook, with a web form for add/delete/changes to it?

    It's not quite as bad as stuffing them into some app their not used to through a complex delivery method.

  • I've done a little LDAP work with Java using JNDI. It should not be too difficult to knock out a Swing app that can read and update an LDAP address book, and it would of course be cross platform. Browsing an address book is what people do 90% of the time, so they should tolerate using a separate application to update it.

  • rolodap (Score:3, Informative)

    by dead_penguin ( 31325 ) on Friday August 16, 2002 @06:58PM (#4086236)
    I really like seeing a question asked when it's something that I'm in the process of figuring out for myself at that exact moment! ;)

    Rolodap [sourceforge.net] looks very promising. I'm probably going to put it up this weekend if I get time.

  • Don't be a jerk. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by hatless ( 8275 ) on Saturday August 17, 2002 @12:31AM (#4087767)
    What's "non-clueful" about people who don't want to run a second desktop environment on top of the one they already have? What's wrong with wanting copy-and-paste that works well and being able to sync your addressbook to an offline laptop and a PDA?

    I'm assuming your current system's worst problem (if there's even a problem at all) is that this Access-based system isn't integrated with your e-mail clients. It sure is nice to be able to access and select entries from your addressbook straight into the "To:" and "Cc:" fields of the message composition interface. I'll bet that's what will make users happiest. Maybe you should make user productivity and user happiness your primary goal, and not pick a backend technology first. If users are happy with the current system (and they probably aren't), is it a speed issue you could address by migrating the data to a better database and keeping the Access frontend, or is it an interface and data model issue that points to the complete overhaul you have in mind?

    That said, LDAP's a good, flexible, extensible way to store multiuser, multi-departmental addressbooks. Go for it. But unless you're a complete jerk, you'll only use it if you can provide the users with interfaces that are at least as convenient (from their standpoint, not yours) as what they have now, and are preferably better. I don't think ugly XWindow applications (and X itself) glopped onto their Windows desktops are the answer.

    You can get a good interface between addressbook and e-mail with Outlook. Heck, you can get that with the web interface to Exchange or Notes. What mail system are you using? Generic IMAP? Fine.

    Granted, even with the best antivirus protection pushed out to every machine and aggressive scanning on the servers and WSH disabled in Outlook, you still may not be able to sleep nights knowing Outlook's out there. Maybe you can deploy a nice LDAP-maintenance tool or two for people to edit the addressbooks with (a simple web one and a complex, advanced Java one for power users) along with a mail client that can access the same LDAP store read-only.
    • Oh, but I'm not a jerk. :) There are actually a number of extremely important reasons from the Access-to-LDAP migration; Quite simply, the version of Access that we actually have seats for is apparently incapable of displaying or listing in the appropriate volumes. (We might be a small company, but the .ldif file is 20000 lines long. ;) The back-end was chosen because of its integration with sundry email clients, with an eye to a linux-ward upgrade for the salesfolks. (This latter actually makes sense for us, as we also do engineering and thus have a supply of people who know Linux; in many instances we therefore do not need the simplifications and retardations of Windows. Now, if only I could find an OSS office suite that didn't butcher Word docs...

    • And, as for the 'second desktop' issue, these people *really* don't know how to work computers. Sorry; they simply don't. If I installed, say, XFree86, which lacks a native-window-widgets mode, then all
      day long I would hear a steady stream of complaints pertaining to disappearing desktop icons, the difficulties of using a non-Windows WM, etc....

      AFAIK, the best/cheapest Win32 rootless X server solution is $90 a head. We don't want to pay that.
  • Apparently the new Alpa version of Mozilla addes RW support of LDAP
  • Since recently upgrading our company's server's from exchange (god I hated that thing) to MDaemon, our systems have been working amazingly well and reliable.
    One of the bonuses to using Mdaemon, is a companion product, which can also be used as a stand-alone product, is Ldaemon, based on the OpenLDAP code. (It actually includes the OpenLDAP code that its based on!)
    Not to sound like a plug for the product, but since I installed it, most of my mail headaches just went away... (giving me more /. time!)
    Anyways, heres the link
    http://www.altn.com/Products/Default.asp?product_i d=LDaemon [altn.com]

  • xmanager might help (Score:2, Interesting)

    by hrbrmstr ( 324215 )
    netsarang.com has a pretty inexpensive, commercial (supported) X server that works the way you seem to need it to (even has ssh suppot). I've used it from Win98->2K->XP flawlessly (when not on my linux or solaris boxes). you can try it for free (and if you can put up with annoy-ware, you can just hit 'cancel' when the free trial period dialog comes up and it will still function flawlessly).

    one thing your post has done is remind me of that "final" killer app - M$ Access. We've been doing a good job @ work coming up with as many alternatives to the M$ on the desktop. Before Ximian's wonderfull xchng connector, we used a whacky combo of fetchmail (with NTLM support), imap, and pine to read/send mail and do rudimentary calendaring (it can be presented by xchng as an imap folder). I can read PDF's with open source and use cool print spool hacks to make better PDF's than adobe's writer. OpenOffice/StarOffice get us by on the majority of docs and I see so little of Visio files anymore that it is no longer on the 'killer' list.

    Unfortunately, we have a few Excel spreadsheets that neither "Office" likes (*why* do folks insist on creating Excel *databases*!). those users that got a bit smarter made access db's (which I don't need to use frequenetly and - hence - forgot about) - *without* a SQL back-end! - and there's little we can do do mitigate that.

    just when i thought our work was almost done...
  • Maybe you could try labe [savoirfairelinux.com] ? It is a web based LDAP adress book editor written in PHP that nicely handles all the Outlook attributes.
    Disclaimer: yes, I am working for Savoir-faire Linux, the company that made this software.
  • In fact, I use LDAP lookup every day through Mozilla for email adresses and the address book. It's pretty simple.

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