Thanks to everyone who replied! And thanks, Quanah, for your frank
assessment of this task. :-) I had no idea I was biting off more than I
could chew. I knew I'd have a (steep) learning curve for LDAP, but I guess
I thought the most obvious application for it would be to make an address
book for e-mail clients. Guess not! :-)
So I'm now leaning towards just punting. My Plan B is to put all the data
into a SQL database, then have it periodically generate a flat, simple LDAP
directory suitable for use in Thunderbird and Outlook Express.
Disadvantages: it will be full of duplicate names/addresses, it won't be in
perfect sync with the "canonical" information stored in MySQL, and it won't
really be doing what LDAP was designed for. Advantages: I won't have to
care about duplicates, since the LDAP directory won't be canonical - it'll
be there solely to serve as an email-address-autocomplete helper in
OE/Thunderbird. Any other address applications (i.e. printing a bound paper
directory, displaying an online directory), I'll do with MySQL and
scripting.
Hallvard, thanks for letting me browse around your LDAP server - that gives
me an idea of what fields are used by Outlook Express vs. Thunderbird, as
well as what fields both clients will use in address autocompletion. Adam,
your presentation (which was very helpful) mentioned a mHybrid schema, which
I found at http://www.whitemiceconsulting.com/node/53 . Does that cover
only Outlook and Evolution, or does it also cover Thunderbird?
Thanks again, all. I'm not totally sold on my Plan B, since LDAP is
probably still the "right" solution for storing my church's family
information, but since Thunderbird and OE are mainly what I want to support
(and since SQL/Perl/PHP etc. are already in my toolbox), I may just have to
go that route...
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