[BBLISA] Help with addressbook management

[Public]

Didn't see a response to this so I thought I would mention a couple of
things.

On Wed, 2004-03-24 at 15:17, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
> For the last few days I've been suffering through my first corporate
> addressbook setup.  There are several specific problems that I can't
> seem to find any solutions to.  Please offer advice if you can!  ;-)
> 
> ---------- background info ---------------
...
> We have heterogeneous mail clients -- some Oultook, some Outlook
> Express, some Netscape 7, some Mozilla.  
> 
> We have some computers that stay in the office, but laptops travel.  So
> the addressbook has to be made available offline, too.
> 
> -------------------------------------------
...
> -2- I need some way to download the addressbook to the local computer
> for offline usage, because the laptops travel.  I can't find any way to
> do this in Outlook, and although Netscape has a "download" button, it
> doesn't seem to do anything.
...

FWIW, you may want to consider making the directory, or a portion of it,
available as a vCard file.  I believe all the mail clients you mentioned
can import vCards.

In the *nix world it's fairly easy to write a script the queries the
LDAP system and creates a vCard file.  A simple cron entry will update
and distribute this file on a regular basis.

In addition there are open source tools out there to put a web front end
on  your LDAP db.  I haven't tried these, but I have heard mention of:

http://rolodap.sourceforge.net/
    and
http://web500gw.sourceforge.net/
 
  - Paul Beltrani