--- Kent Busbee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi all, Howdy.
> I'm new; I come from the NOLUG. Since I've moved to > Hammond, I thought I > would check ya'll out. Weird. I'm on the BRLUG and recently subscribed to NOLUG to check them out as well. :) > I have a question about email centers. My > brother-in-law has a small office > and he wants to share contacts. He has three > workstations (PC's running > Windows XP at the time), a Palm Pilot, and Nokia > cellular phone. He would > LOVE to have all the PC's (at least) and maybe the > Palm Pilot and phone > share the same contact info. Nifty. > I was trying to think of the best way to do this. > Is there an alternative > to something like an Exchange Server, which I know > would be overkill and I > would like to avoid anyway. Can a Linux server do > something like this? Of course. Linux is a 2x4. Whaddya wanna build with it? ;) > At the least I could write some sort of program to > sink comma delimitated > (CSV) exports/imports which is a very ugly solution. > I know that the Palm > Pilot supports CSV. I have no idea what can be done > with his Nokia cell > phone. First, focus on sharing the contact info with the PCs. Both the Palm Pilot and most new cell phones will depend on other PC installed apps to synchronize address books and other data with those devices. There are lots of ways to share address books between PCs, but I think the best way would be to use something based on OpenLDAP (http://www.openldap.org). For a good intro to doing exactly what you want, read Dustin's article: http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2003/03/27/ldap_ab.html The key thing is that you will need to choose an email client that all three devices (PC, Palm Pilot, cell phone) can use to talk to your contact info database (OpenLDAP server). Sadly, I think this would be Microsoft Outlook. MS Outlook supports OpenLDAP, for address book info, etc. I know Palm Pilot supports synchronization with Outlook; I assume that Nokia does as well. Remember that Unix/Linux likes to use small modular apps to build solutions. So, there aren't many mail server packages that include OpenLDAP setup to do what you want. I know of one: http://packages.debian.org/testing/mail/postfix-ldap though there are probably others. The thing to remember is that you can use most any Linux mail server and install OpenLDAP to server address book info alongside the mail server. The two functions are actually separate; Microsoft bundled them together in Exchange to add value. HTH, John Hebert __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Photos: High-quality 4x6 digital prints for 25ยข http://photos.yahoo.com/ph/print_splash
