Hi Jader,
I contributed the smeserver-ldap-contacts rpm.
The way it works now is that global contacts are imported from a specified tab-delimited text file. That file can be maintained directly, such as with a spreadsheet...
Or, it can be populated by exporting contacts from Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird or some other address book into the specified file.
The contrib checks every hour and updates the LDAP directory if the file has changed.
An example of how this works in one office is that anyone who wants to add a 'global' contact sends the contact info to the receptionist who then creates a new Outlook contact; she then (or later) *manually* exports contacts to the specified text file for global contacts.
This arrangement works well enough for global contacts (I suppose when they aren't changing *too* much).
Addressing your concerns:
1) the contrib could probably be expanded to handle a personal directory (at least one) for each SME user; however, each user would be required to *manually* export their addressbook on a 'timely' basis.
For your purposes, is this a reasonable requirement?
Alternatively, a keyboard/mouse recording macro could be developed to 'automatically' do the export.
Anybody know of such a macro recording utility for Windows XP?
2) As for having an addressbook available everywhere:
By default LDAP is configured for access only from the SME server's private network.
Public access would be need to be granted for accessing the LDAP directories externally (and port 389 would need to be open on the firewall).
Anybody know of any security risks with public LDAP access?
Regards,
Hasan
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