LDAP-Based Address Books for Win32?

Snafoo asks: "I'm trying to replace an Access-powered communal address book at my office with something cross-platform and (preferably) LDAP-powered. Unfortunately, I can't find a single email client for windows that would allow people to update the LDAP dB from their address-book interface except, the usual suspect, Outlook. I've tried Mozilla, Eudora, and a slew of other 'freebies', but they only allow browsing; at the moment, I'm considering dropping cygwin+XFree on the desktops of the windows clients and giving them access to Evolution on a central server (God bless Ximian!), however, most of the Win32 boxen are used by non-clueful sorts who would be put out by the inconvenience of what amounts to a second desktop. Aside from shelling out $90 a seat for WinAxe, or another rootless X server for Windows, what do you all recommend?" Those interested in X-Servers for Windows may wish to check out this previous article, however if you are using an X11 server not mentioned, please feel free to recommend others, here.

Comments

Don't be a jerk.

[hatless]

What's "non-clueful" about people who don't want to run a second desktop environment on top of the one they already have? What's wrong with wanting copy-and-paste that works well and being able to sync your addressbook to an offline laptop and a PDA?

I'm assuming your current system's worst problem (if there's even a problem at all) is that this Access-based system isn't integrated with your e-mail clients. It sure is nice to be able to access and select entries from your addressbook straight into the "To:" and "Cc:" fields of the message composition interface. I'll bet that's what will make users happiest. Maybe you should make user productivity and user happiness your primary goal, and not pick a backend technology first. If users are happy with the current system (and they probably aren't), is it a speed issue you could address by migrating the data to a better database and keeping the Access frontend, or is it an interface and data model issue that points to the complete overhaul you have in mind?

That said, LDAP's a good, flexible, extensible way to store multiuser, multi-departmental addressbooks. Go for it. But unless you're a complete jerk, you'll only use it if you can provide the users with interfaces that are at least as convenient (from their standpoint, not yours) as what they have now, and are preferably better. I don't think ugly XWindow applications (and X itself) glopped onto their Windows desktops are the answer.

You can get a good interface between addressbook and e-mail with Outlook. Heck, you can get that with the web interface to Exchange or Notes. What mail system are you using? Generic IMAP? Fine.

Granted, even with the best antivirus protection pushed out to every machine and aggressive scanning on the servers and WSH disabled in Outlook, you still may not be able to sleep nights knowing Outlook's out there. Maybe you can deploy a nice LDAP-maintenance tool or two for people to edit the addressbooks with (a simple web one and a complex, advanced Java one for power users) along with a mail client that can access the same LDAP store read-only.

xmanager might help

[hrbrmstr]

netsarang.com has a pretty inexpensive, commercial (supported) X server that works the way you seem to need it to (even has ssh suppot). I've used it from Win98->2K->XP flawlessly (when not on my linux or solaris boxes). you can try it for free (and if you can put up with annoy-ware, you can just hit 'cancel' when the free trial period dialog comes up and it will still function flawlessly).

one thing your post has done is remind me of that "final" killer app - M$ Access. We've been doing a good job @ work coming up with as many alternatives to the M$ on the desktop. Before Ximian's wonderfull xchng connector, we used a whacky combo of fetchmail (with NTLM support), imap, and pine to read/send mail and do rudimentary calendaring (it can be presented by xchng as an imap folder). I can read PDF's with open source and use cool print spool hacks to make better PDF's than adobe's writer. OpenOffice/StarOffice get us by on the majority of docs and I see so little of Visio files anymore that it is no longer on the 'killer' list.

Unfortunately, we have a few Excel spreadsheets that neither "Office" likes (*why* do folks insist on creating Excel *databases*!). those users that got a bit smarter made access db's (which I don't need to use frequenetly and - hence - forgot about) - *without* a SQL back-end! - and there's little we can do do mitigate that.

just when i thought our work was almost done...