I initially visited the concept of using LDAP as a centralized address book store for contacts back in 2005, but was ultimately disappointed with client side support. I finally have actual need of such a solution, I am more interested in finding a functional solution. In three years, the situation obviously hasn’t improved much.
- Christian Weiske documented his experiences with a LDAP addressbook page
- Another LDAP configuration guide which seems to recommend mozillaOrgPerson schema
- Luma is great for managing your LDAP directory tree
- Sharing an Address Book via an LDAP Server by Bob Smith is quite extensive
In either case, the take home seems to be, if you want to use LDAP to replicate address book information, you can go pound sand. It’s do-able, but with a ton of caveats. It’s more useful in an enterprise setting where contact information is dictated upstream.
Another possibility is using Kolab (XML format with IMAP as backend data store), which has excellent support in Kontact. However, the Thunderbird SyncKolab plugin tended to eat my calendar entries, making me fear for my contact data. Or there are online services like through Google, though I prefer to have my data housed locally.
Could be I’ll just sync contacts from my phone to my laptop, where they’ll be backed up nightly anyway.
Update, November 16th. Thinking about it again, I may go back to using Kolab anyway. The field integration with Kontact’s kaddressbook is far superior and most of it seems to work with SyncKolab. Hopefully the latest 1.0.2 release of SyncKolab doesn’t eat tasks and calendar entries created by Kontact.