[plug] Portable Address Book

[James Devenish]

In message <41984726.4010506 at postnewspapers.com.au>
on Mon, Nov 15, 2004 at 02:05:26PM +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:
> In my opinion the right solution is offline-LDAP - that is, synch with
> an LDAP server when its availible, but keep the data locally for quick
> and offline access. Alas, I'm yet to see any mail client with this,
> let alone all of them as would be desirable for such a use. *sigh*.

I found that roaming profiles with Netscape/Mozilla were capable of
dealing with personal address books and bookmarks, but I no longer
use them because my work patterns have changed.

These days, I presume it would be better that people exchanged calendars
and contacts using iCalendar and vCard, rather than LDIF. iCalendar and
vCard are designed as interchange protocols whereas LDAP is a directory
query system. And, for instance, it is not necessarily true that
iCalendar makes a good back-end storage format even if it is the
interchange protocol. But, since a lot of address book technology
predates the use of LDAP (and is not necessarily invalidated by the use
of newer protocols) I would have hoped the established backends could
have been cobbled with LDAP connectors to provide the roaming facility.
However, as you imply, LDAP seems particularly suitable for address
books in its own right.