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Moving Outlook/vCards to an LDAP Address Book?
T-Suit asks: "I'm looking for a way to move 1000+ vCards (the result of painful consolidation after going through our sales' team personal Outlook contacts) into OpenLDAP, so that we can access them from all plaftorms. I've looked at Dawn, but its LDIF export is too crufty for ldapadd and it doesn't solve the issue of how to update those records easily, so I'd also need some kind of 'master GU' to edit them remotely. Along the way, I must say I am amazed at the lack of good LDAP-only contact manager apps for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Besides Evolution (which behaves strangely for me and doesn't show all the fields Outlook entries have), all 'nice' 'shared address book' tools I see are limited, web-based or rely on a SQL database. LDAP Management apps (such as diradmin) allow me to edit all fields, but are not for casual users (or available on Windows). Any suggestions on how to both import and maintain this data?"
Yes, O2003 BCM should help you out here. I was "lucky" enough to get in on beta and though it was particularly buggy and slow (expected in a beta) it offered a lot of features including what you are looking for.
Sadly, you will have to wait a month or two and fork over a couple hundred bucks-- but it seems like you have those kind of resources.
The New Root Council, kickin' ass sinc
Place a Rolodex in a central location. Perhaps by the coffee machine.
SunOne/IPlanet/Netscape directory server has a nice gooey GUI for adding/searching/modifying. Searches can be done via web-browser...
So, just make an OU for contacts, dump the contacts in with Perl, create accounts for your salesy people and give them admin privilege of the contacts ou. It'll take a little time to get all the bugs worked out and lusers trained, but it will be functional from the start. I think.
Then you hire someone to come in and write a couple of little Perl CGI's using the PerlDap module or the variety of others available. I've been messing around with one that allows lusers to update a few of their records via Apache (perl modules CGI, PerLdap; Apache module mod_auth_ldap). Not too hard.
"You may all go to hell and I will go to Texas"
Sen. Davy Crocket to US Congress, Nov. 1, 1835
What I did was to use Dawn to produce an initial .ldif file. Then I wrote a little script to massage entries based on the dn's and ou's that I wanted to use. Create said dn's and ou's via a seperate, hand crafted .ldif, a quick little exercise, bring in your massaged .ldif, and you're set.
To manage, phpLDAPadmin is the best tool I've found so far.
Outlook, Mozilla, etc. can all access as clients.
I also recommend LDAP System Administration by Gerald Carter, though with some reservations. It provides a decent grounding in LDAP, but won't be an end-all-be-all definitive resource.
We used a program called AddressMagic to convert the 7000 or so Outlook "Contacts Folder" contacts to LDIF in an attempt to get them into OpenLDAP. Much like you our efforts were in vain. Outlook's got too much crap in there that's just plain undocumented but our office staff use (categories being the biggest one).
I've been playing with Exchange4Linux -- Crappy name but some really nifty software. Everything is stored in PostgreSQL -- everything -- This is both a good thing and a bad thing; Postgres is well up to the task, but the E4L server software is quite slow at the moment. They've written it in Python, and it talks to the proprietary Outlook connector via CORBA. Why CORBA? I dunno; it doesn't talk through firewalls worth a shit. :-(
I've successfully imported our 4000 contacts without even blinking. I also imported an additional 3.2GB of email, journals, notes and schedule data. Postgres just took it in and asked for more. This is on a server with an UW3 disk subsystem and 1G of memory.
Looking at the DB any "pure" MAPI object is stored in plain english, both by parameter name and value. Any Outlook-specific crap is stored with MAPIhexstringhere names and whatever data format Outlook uses for the data. It would be dead simple trivial to convert that into LDAP, but why bother when PostgreSQL has an LDAP frontend you can probably get working.
The nicest thing about E4L is that the Outlook guys lose zero functionality and (when completed) the IMAP, LDAP and iCAP frontends will give full connectivity to the entire OSS crowd. E4L is planning on making money selling Outlook connector licenses (which aren't that dear, really) but as I mentioned earlier, the server is 100% OSS and free (beer and libre). I realize that oGo is out there but to be honest, oGo looks enormously complex and it's written in a hideous language. I'd rather spend my time learning Python than Objective-C any day, thank you very much. E4L's got a single unified backend (PostgreSQL) which is scalable and solid, and with some more work (moving more into stored procedures, using the LDAP frontend, etc.) it will be an Exchange killer. It already works flawlessly with Outlook, as I mentioned.