openldap + kmail

[Craig White]

On Fri, 2008-04-25 at 22:40 +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> Craig White wrote:
> 
> >> >> I should have said that I'm hoping to maintain my address book
> >> >> with phpLDAPadmin, which as far as I can see more or less forces one
> >> >> to choose a standard schema.
> 
> >> > I honestly don't know what a standard schema is...I know what schema's
> >> > I tend to set up but in reality, it really doesn't matter as long as
> >> > the schema you set up makes sense to you.
> 
> As far as I could see - I haven't experimented with it much -
> phpLDAPadmin creates half-a-dozen top-level entries,
> and if you try to create an entry under any of them
> you have to choose one of a number of offered schemas.
> That is what I meant by a "standard" schema.
----
those are 'templates'
----
> I do find the language of LDAP unattractive.
> Assuming the idea is to create a tree-like structure
> (like the Unix file-system)
> the way of expressing it seems strange.
> But I'm getting the book by Gerald Carter you mention,
> and maybe that will change my mind.
----
well, it might be unattractive but it's entirely versatile, which I
suppose is part of it's unattractiveness.

I think what most people struggle with is not the language but rather
the extremely rigid rule sets.

If LDAP wasn't thoroughly useful, it wouldn't be so widely used. It is
part and parcel of Microsoft Active Directory as well as all sorts of
UNIX/Linux setups. It can handle not only address books, but
authentication, DNS, mail routing, various application preferences,
binary blobs like pictures, etc.

It's overkill for a shared address book until you try to find another
shared address book solution.

Craig