I am still puzzling through this LDAP question. The question is roughly this: what is the right way to store my own phone book on a server so that I can access it via whatever address book is available to me on whatever computer I’ve managed to land in front of?
Most organizations I work with would use their databases more and better if they didn’t have to also maintain their email based address book in Thunderbird or Eudora or Outlook. Address changes would make it into the database and be shared across the organization if it were that easy. A database that needs a lot of other data about a person and what they’ve been involved in, that you’d have to access through a database interface, but the addresses alone could be LDAPish and that would be handy.
Catch is, I just don’t get it. I will, I just don’t yet.
For instance, it sort of seems like a webhost with a lot of LDAP libraries installed ought to be able to support an LDAP server. Seems like. Seems like if I knew where to start, I could start, but I don’t.
Slowly, over a very, very long stretch of time, I’ll get there. Hopefully when I do, I an leave a trail that will make a ton more sense to the next person than the crumbs I’ve been able to find.
let me get this right. you want you take your phone book entries and store it in a
central ldap directory that is publicly available. Is that right ? Or do you care of the format ?
a) central ldap directory – you might lose your friends pronto. Unless there is some decent
authen/author mechanism
b) In any format ? vCard ? If not, I would just dump them in LDIF format and store it.
?
Definitely authenticated.
I want to be able to access it and maintain it from multiple locations, i don’t want to make it public.
I don’t just want to store it. I want to be able to make updates when I am authenticated. So if I am at work and someone sends me their new address, I update my LDAP address book. When I am at home, I see the same address book.
have you tried exporting the addressbooks to ldif and uploading them ?
there are some vCard to LDIF convertors on the internet (google search)
helps to know what apps you are using .. (outlook/mail/mac address book etc)
cheers
LDAP is one of those things I really wish I knew better because I know it has some mad good uses… but it’s a PITA and I haven’t put in the time. Basically, if you have an OpenLDAP (or other LDAP platform) server with the right data structure, you can export your addressbook into LDIF (or write a script to do it — it’s a pretty simple format) and import it into an LDAP directory. Many email clients can connect to it.
Funny I finally discovered your blog; I was just talking to a colleague about how we couldn’t think up a the “web 2.0″ version of an addressbook. Where’s the social, ajaxified, open-api, open-protocol, easy to use addressbook application with subtle, pastel gradients and rounded corners…
You mean that you don’t think that Plaxo is the wonder solution? I’m shocked.
I think that the identity woman might have something to add to the search for a web 2.0 address book. It took me a long time to wrap my head around the potential value of something like that project (okay, so one thing I can’t pull up right now is the name of the project, but it is a distributed identity thing. You maintain your i-card or whatever it is and you allow people to subscribe to it.)
My challenge for a long time was that I was trying to solve a different problem, one that the identity 2.0 sector isn’t really tackling. My other problem is that it is impossible to find any kind of overview of “what they are working on” or “who they are” which is making this comment awfully vague and cryptic.
The idea, I think, is an open plaxo-like system. You get yourself an identity broker, the protocol is open so that anyone can be an identity broker and it is all interoperable, so you decide who can “subscribe” to your identity and your broker allows you to store your subscribed identities and bingo.
The big problem is that a) it isn’t done yet and b) the folks working on it don’t explain themselves very well, and to some degree they don’t get that this is not the holy grail from an organizational perspective because the secret truth is that, while everyone wants their privacy, they do give money to organizations that send compelling appeal letters. So from an institutional or organizational perspective I’m not really (shh. don’t tell) that interested in whether or not you think you want to hear from me and I sure as hell can’t be waiting around for you to log into your idenity account and approve me. So as an organization I still need to be able to maintain my own database where I store my own collected data about where you really live, not where you like to tell people you live.
And so, in the meantime, LDAP.
Which brings me to Rajeev–my little address book project is the tip of an iceberg. LDAP might be overkill, but I think it is a discreet and useful application of LDAP from which I can move on to bigger and better things.
One thing I told Leda early on in the Dot Organize requirements gathering process, was that the One True Database, the one that brings you one step closer to database nirvana (sorry Sam, I can’t find your article online anymore), has to offer something like LDAP integration.
If you want everyone in your organization to (really) keep the database up to date, you can’t ask them to maintain an address book (since that is where they are going to look for email addresses) AND the database. They have to be able to communicate with the database as their address book. That is a tricky and problematic suggestion, I know, but aren’t we problem solvers?
Amanda, you should boil down that comment and make it a post. :)
i am hearing a ldap “service” in here. Most people think of addressbooks
when they think of ldap – where as in reality it is a database of “anything” -
people, identities, services, protocols etc. Question is whether a yet another protocol needs to be developed. I for one doubt it.
keep it coming. I am still reading the posts/comments over and over to
draw a cogent thought process.
Ahh. I am not proposing a new protocol. The identity protocol is an altogether different thing, I have to track down the actual name of it. You might be right that a different protocol is overkill, but I think IANA or some such formal body has already swilled the koolaid so they may be beyond persuading.
[...] Amanda’s got a vague and curious LDAP thread here that got my interest perked up. Somehow, I think there is a more to it than just a “I want a ldap service to host my addressbook” train of thought here. Scratch. Scratch. [...]
XRI/XDI
I’m sure you have seen this – http://www.ootao.com/Page/xdi.html
Yeah. That.
a service that hosts a suffix with admin acls on that suffix is what you are looking for.
(I hope the formatting is preserved. its gonna look ugly otherwise – Amanda – need a preview for comments :) )
dc=server,dc=com ou=amanda --> you signed up and they gave you a suffix ou=public ou=identities cn=rajeev All my information that you care to store, including my interests, my online status, my own XID information, my dog's name and when I fed it last. cn=scott All of scott's info ou=private All of your private info, including when you fed your dog last. ou=someother user.and a web interface to signup, make acl changes and what not.
yikes! lost all my formatting.
The “pre” tags aren’t pretty but better than nothing. Researching comment previews in Word Press is now on my to do list, promise.
More precisely, LDAP is a protocol designed to provide a *directory* of anything — a directory being a specific kind of data store, characterized by needing to handle many more lookups quickly than updates/inserts/deletes…
this may be the tip (of the iceberg) you are looking for…
http://j2anywhere.com/j2system/projects/ab4ldap/index.jsp
Something more, yah.
And threaded comments in Word Press, that would be a thing to have. Add to the to do list (right after “allow html in comments”). I’m betting that it is out there somewhere.
But Rajeev, to respond to “scratch, scratch” — yeah. There is indeed more going on. More which is that I am starting to sniff out that LDAP might be a tool that is useful for more than just shared inter-office directories.
But hosting my own address book someplace would be helpful, so I’m thinking that is probably a good place to start learning LDAP, because I’d have a reason to troubleshoot it, because I’d want it to work properly for me.
If I had a bio on this site someplace (which I could, and eventually will) it would say that one thing I do is InterActivist, which hosts interactivist.net which means that I have some servers to play on, so it isn’t unthinkable to set up an LDAP server. But another thing I did until recently was LINC, which was a technology assistance project where I worked (suppose LINC still is what LINC is, but I’m not) with community organizers who were navigating all kinds of data management challenges. I was supposed to solve all their problems on a shoe string, but it never really worked out like that. I solved some problems, created new ones, flew home, tried to troubleshoot by phone. All told I think the impact was positive, but it took work. That was where I started to see a need for database contact information stored in a universally retrievable format. You want your database, yes, but most folks are so used to using the address book that is attached to their email client that they want all the contact information they really use there. So they keep that up to date. They may or may not keep the database up to date, and then when they quit or go on vacation or get fired or whatever it is, all that data is gone or just stored in a place where only they can get to it. Which isn’t that useful.
However, from where I sit, at a borrowed laptop on an overflowing desk in a ground floor study in Waterloo London, I’d also like my address book.
Waterloo! Sorry, I’m london-obsessed.
Just commenting because I’m trying to figure out some addreess book LDAP type stuff for NYCAHN right now. They want to share their Outlook address books and load them up onto their new Blackberries. And then of course, there’s having that link up to ODB or whatever DB I install for them… sigh.
Also, I like the Brian’s Threaded Comments WordPress plug-in.
[...] Amanda’s got a vague and curious LDAP thread here that got my interest perked up. Somehow, I think there is a more to it than just a “I want a ldap service to host my addressbook” train of thought here. Scratch. Scratch. [...]