[Zope-CMF] Re: Zope + CMF + LDAP Contact Management + Email clients

[ham.zope-cmf@tmachine.net]

I've been looking for a long time for something that can unify our general
workflow between our different office applications. Whilst everyone works
as individuals, most apps play well together, and e.g. the major web
browsers come with their own decent email clients (mozilla, msie, navigator, etc).

MS applications are also typically good a t talking to one another.

But we need to move to group-shared working, with single-copies of every piece of
data (hard), and cross-platform application independence (very hard: have you ever
tried getting ANYTHING in Linux that can speak to MS Project, for instance?).

Zope with the various add-ons seems to solve most of the problems (e..g MSWord docs
can be edited as HTML by people without Word, auto-application launching lets people
"edit directly from the webpage" using their favourite locally-installed application
(wihtout having to worry about/remember/understand uploading the file back to the server when they finish) etc.

The one remaining problem is unifying our contacts data - all of us pick up many
contacts each week that we need to automatically be sharing with everyone else. The
intelligent solution (in fact, the ONLY option it seems) is something LDAP-based on the
server-side (since all major email clients seem to handle LDAP-based addressbooks these
days), which would preserve the "single copy, application independent" requirements.

Unfortunately, I can't seem to find any way of doing this with existing ZOPE add-ons.
It seems natural (to me - but perhaps thats just because of how we want to use this)
that a CMF add-on would allow contacts stored and edited in the CMF to be automatically
exported via an LDAP interface to any/all email clients. I've searched the 600-odd
ZOPE addons on the zope.org site, but it seems LDAP is only being used for user-management
and authentication. Surely someone somewhere is using it for the contact-management side
of things?

If I'm doing somethign obviously dumb here (like failing to see an easy way of getting
this to work!) please enlighten me - I've never used Zope before, and although I'm
a competent sysadmin I have little or no idea how to best do something like this in Zope
(I'm still working my way through the Zope Book! :) But I need to show that Zope can do
everything we need [or at least have a plan for how much we have to add for that...] before
I get permission to spend lots of time on it :(.

Thanks!
Adam