[RCD] LDAP addressbook : uid or mail as RDN?

Hi RC-Dev list,

I'm setting up an LDAP shared address book and while googling for information I found this thread in your archives (I wasn't a list member then):

• http://lists.roundcube.net/mail-archive/dev/2011-10/0000015.html

(oct 2011)

• http://lists.roundcube.net/mail-archive/dev/2011-11/0000000.html

(nov 2011)

Please let me add a few comments to this thread. I Hope this is the right place to post and that my English is good enough. Forgive me otherwise.

1. UID or Email as RDN?

When working with small companies and/or workgroups it's quite frequent to see several people sharing a single email address, typically something like "little_company@some_big_isp.tld". This is my everyday experience with small companies and small local administrations too (I live in a rural area).

Using mail as the RDN makes it impossible to add more than one contact in such situations, even if you want them because, in spite of a common work mail address, different people still have different mobile numbers, different home mail addresses, etc.

So, IMO it would probably be better to use a dynamically generated UID as RDN.

2. RC writing data to the address book

How would RC know how to build new UID's compatible with a specific setup?

IMO the main advantage with LDAP is having mail clients being able to read a shared address book. Getting RC writing to the directory doesn't look that important to me: suppose you get the feature to work with RC, as an admin you are left with the same problem for each other client you may want/need to support at your company. Until there is some standard address book schema that every client should support, but I don't know of any right now.

So, IMO a much simpler approach is to stick with a dedicated application to setup and manage the address book, and look for good read capabilities of mail clients. I mean that more flexibility in the way RC can do the mapping between LDAP attributes and contact fields is IMO the most important feature to focus on.

Personally I use "Contagged" to manage contacts of the LDAP address book:

• http://www.cosmocode.de/en/opensource/contagged

http://www.splitbrain.org/blog/2007-06/27-contagged_the_ldap_address_book

It is a free application from the same developer who wrote DokuWiki:

• http://www.dokuwiki.org

This application does a good job for small companies, and it would be great if there was a simple way to make RC read more fields from the address book, display tags (Contagged provides tags) as RC "groups", etc.

Please let me know if there is a better or more standard way to get these things done: I'm rather new to this LDAP stuff.

Thanks a lot to all RC developers, you do have a great application :-)

Beñat

List info: http://lists.roundcube.net/dev/ BT/aba52c80