I agree with not relying solely on LDAP. Requiring LDAP for the local address book imposes yet another installation/configuration/maintenance/support requirement on the RoundCube administrator. Also, for people who are hosting RoundCube on third-part web servers, LDAP may not even be an option.

Having said that, LDAP is a very common directory service provider for many companies and I think we need to support LDAP seamlessly. Many e-mail clients (Thunderbird, Apple Mail) support read-only access to LDAP directories as a supplement to their local address book. I like this model, which is generally where RoundCube is headed right now. There are some things we could do to more fully support LDAP directories, some of which are in Tickets already:

• address completion should incorporate results from an LDAP query (Ticket #1483899)
• authenticated bind to an LDAP server (there's a patch floating around somewhere to hard-code this)
• expanded query capability (useful for large directories). This should be kept in mind when adding fields to the local address book.
  

-Eric

On Fri, 11 Aug 2006 12:58:18 +0200, Thomas Bruederli wrote:

You right with LDAP. There's LDAP access implemented but only for
searching and copying to the local address book. I think we should not
only rely on LDAP only because not everybody has set up an LDAP server
to access it. A local address book should be part of the package and
used by default Maybe we could add some more abstraction that would let
us replace the local address book with an existing LDAP account just by
configuration.
Nevertheless we need to implement a user interface for address
management that complies the expectations of a RoundCube user.

Unfortunately I don't have access to an LDAP directory which makes it
impossible for me work on that or even to make some concrete suggestions.

~Thomas

Kirktis wrote:
> I did hesitate to send this, for the sole reason that it proposes
> additional requirements; but isn't LDAP designed to do exactly what is
> wanted here? In fact, I was under the (perhaps incorrect) impression
> that someone was already making progress on an LDAP address book
> feature. This also has the additional benefit that it can be made
> compliant with using LDAP address books on userland software (ie:
> Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.).
>
> Unless I miss something, that would provide exactly those features that
> are being requested.>