[Gllug] LDAP and updates

[itsbruce at uklinux.net]

On Fri, Nov 01, 2002 at 04:20:33PM +0000, Xander D Harkness wrote:
> What I want to know is whether clients such as Mozilla, Evolution, 
> Outlook Express etc. can update the LDAP server on the fly?

The LDAP protocol certainly supports updates and acls.  But I don't know
of any e-mail clients that can write to LDAP address books as well as
read them.

The problem is partly the flexibility of LDAP, which is a free-form
database.  The mail client can simply search the heirarchy (or part of it)
for any records with 'mail' fields (and any other matching criteria you
care to add) and use just the information it needs (e-mail address,
name), ignoring any other data in the records.  To add a record,
however, you would need to specify a particular object type and location
and know which fields to include. 

So you can search an LDAP database for just the information you need
without knowing much about the internal organisation of the data.  But
to add data you need to know quite a lot more.  So the e-mail client
developers don't bother.

-- 
Bruce

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