Re: use ldap as an adressbook in outlook listed all persons

[Terry Lambert <terry@whistle.com>]

Jan-Piet Mens wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 22 Jun 2000, Dominik Berner wrote:
> 
> ...
> > I configured the ldap-server in outlook and put it as
> > the default adress book. But I only can search for
> > people, but I want, that all persons will be listed
> > without searching, like the personal adress book or
> > the gobal adressbook with exchange server.

The communication to the Microsoft Exchange server to
achieve this is via a Microsoft private API which
bypasses the LDAP protocol, and is high overhead, and
thus only suitable for high speed LANs.

The LDAP protocol is generally administratively prohibited
from returning all entries at once.  This has three intents:

1)	When you publish your addres book via LDAP to
	the general Internet, you will find that it is
	extremely undesirable to allow SPAMmers to pull
	down the email address of every one of your
	users.

2)	If you end up with a huge amount of data, such
	as that maintained by the public directories
	"bigfoot" and "four11", the amount of time for
	this download each time someone uses the address
	book will be a significant fraction of their day,
	assuming they have a fast link.

3)	If you have a collection of data on which you
	wish to assert a collection copyright (like on
	a phone directory, dictionary, or encyclopedia),
	then you will not want someone pulling down the
	entirety of your intellectual property in one
	fell swoop (i.e. trivial copy protection).


> AFAIK that is not possible, nor is it desireable. Imagine
> you have several thousand people in your LDAP server; that
> would cause quite some traffic!

Actually, it's desirable from the standpoint of having
the address entry field callback offer to complete your
address input for you, based on the first match to a
partial data entry.  In LDAP, this can be achieved by
asking for one entry back, and using the partial entry
as a search prefix, and searching each time.  This is
probably not the best use of your LDAP server, of course.


-- Terry Lambert
-- Whistle Communications, Inc., an I.B.M. Company
-- terry@whistle.com
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