RE: Need a multi-client schema

["Carr, Chris" <Chris.Carr@Camden.gov.uk>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Howard Chu [mailto:hyc@symas.com] 
> Sent: 22 January 2008 03:16
> Subject: Re: Need a multi-client schema
> 
> Quanah Gibson-Mount wrote:
> > <Chris.Carr@camden.gov.uk>  wrote:
> >
> >> Basic question: is there an existing schema that I can include in 
> >> slapd.conf which will allow my contacts to be intelligible to all 
> >> the clients I use (let alone might use)? 
> >
> > No.  The people who wrote email clients have all decided they each 
> > want things in their own schema, more or less, so they are generally

> > inoperable. You have to have slapd load the schema bits each one 
> > wants, and populate all of those bits, if you want all of them to be

> > happy.  I've filed bugs with numerous email client authors to fix 
> > their things to not rely on custom schema, or to allow the 
> > customization of what fields they look for, with little success.  
> > Eudora at one time was the best client in honoring custom schema,
but 
> > they've morphed into thunderbird, so that pretty much kills that.
> >
> > Most of the clients will understand the general RFC fields, but you 
> > lose the specific customizations they've made.
> 
> Still, it would probably be worth spending a few days effort to
collect the 
> different schema together and define a superset that contains all of
their 
> respective customizations. Then you can use back-relay and the rewrite
overlay 
> to present the client-specific views to each client. The result of
that effort 
> would make a fine entry in the FAQ-o-Matic.

Thanks for the replies. Is there another way of doing this? Instead of
trying to create some super-schema for my server (which would be
outdated every time any of the clients altered its schema), could I not
simply replace each client's schema with a consistent one? 

Let's say that the three clients I want to share contacts are Outlook,
Evolution and Thunderbird. Would it be possible to use the AD schema for
the LDAP server and for all three clients, replacing the default
schemata of Evolution and Thunderbird? 

If this is not possible, how would the super-schema solution propagate
changes made by one client to the data visible to another? (Presumably
this is where "back-relay and the rewrite overlay" come in - will have
to read up on these.)

I found the Evolution schema, though I don't know how up-to-date it is:

http://cvs.mandriva.com/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/SPECS/openldap/evolutionperso
n.schema?view=co

... so I can try combining it with the Mozilla schema and see how far I
get before taking on Outlook. Does anyone know where to find the AD
schema? I can find dozens of pages about it, but can't actually download
it from any of them. 

Yet another way of looking at this is to consider that the combination
of core, cosine and inetorgperson provides all the fields you need in a
basic address book, and it should be possible to get all the clients (at
least the non-MS ones) using that.

I'll report back if I make any progress, but Google shows that people
have been struggling with this problem since the dawn of LDAP, so I'm
not overly optimistic. 

CC

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