[horde] Horde , LDAP, finally managed to make up my mind :-)

[Craig White]

On Thu, 2011-08-04 at 16:47 +0100, Spyros Tsiolis wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I would like to thank Craig for his good help.
> He wrote an excellent e-mail delivered to my personal address.
> I don't know if this helps, but if it does, I can forward the
> e-mail sent to the list.
> 
> Anywho, with Craigs' help, I finally decided and made-up my mind
> on where to store my contact info for horde.
> At some point, I thought MySQL. This is no longer the case.
> I will go with LDAP. But first I will have to wade through a couple
> of books on LDAP. The internet doesn't have much info as far as
> LDAP by example is concerned.
> 
> One critical question though  (and I don't know how to say this) :
> 
> All this is happening for a specific purpose. To have people
> work their Horde account and/or Thunderbird application and/or
> their new smartphone play nice with their contacts list.
> What exactly will I be able to store on these records ?
> E.G. will I be able to store more than two or three e-mail 
> addresses ? More than two or three Mobile phones ?
> More than two or three landline phones ? Skype phones ?
> I think you get my drift.
> The reason I am so picky on this is because I would like to hit
> the nail on the head and not go back to the drawing board at a
> later time and re-design everything from scratch.
> 
> All this because the other day my Nokia E90 fell from my hands.
> The result was the whole of the front face (phone closed), doesn't
> work anymore. I am forced to buy a new one (I decided to purchase a
> new e6 Nokia) and this time I am going to store all my contact info
> on a MySQL table that I will create. All this made me think how to
> start making my life easier, _without_ having to rely to M/S Outlook
> everytime I would like to sync my phone. So there it is.
----
I'm quite sure that I told you that it is far easier to implement MySQL
than LDAP - especially if you don't have a working LDAP setup or
knowledge of how to setup & maintain it.

Even if you get LDAP setup and functional, there's no guarantee that
what Horde maps for attributes will be what your telephone maps for
attributes will be what Thunderbird maps for attributes but Horde has
really flexible mechanics for attribute mapping and it is after all, a
captive client. Just because you can store 3 phone numbers and 3 e-mail
addresses in LDAP doesn't mean that you will find a way to map them to
your telephone or Thunderbird which will have a lot less flexibility
than Turba (which is absolutely brilliant).

There are absolutely no standards for address books and everyone does it
differently and the Nokia phone you buy today with Meego will not be
remotely similar to the ones that they start shipping later this year
with Mango (I'd avoid Nokia phones like the plague at this point).

Again I will tell you - go MySQL backend - it's so much easier.

The Internet has thousands of theories of how LDAP should be set up and
none of them are compatible with another and it actually can be a real
problem if you try to mix different people's implementations.

Learn LDAP - it's absolutely worthwhile. But use MySQL for this project
and if you actually figure out how LDAP works, you can switch later.

Craig