LDAP Address Book

[regilero_]

We've been doing some pythonscripts which can sync Sugar and an OpenLDAP tree for Outlook and Thunderbird. It's released on sugarForge.
I post it now (late) for google readers as they may find it usefull now.
http://www.sugarforge.org/projects/ldapcontactsync/

[CrownHills]

Modifying SugarCRM to look someplace besides it's database for contact record information, as most posters here want, seems like a huge job. Sugar is designed to contain a repository of information, so this modification is not consistent with its fundamental design.

However, LDAP is a protocol. Some LDAP backends contain data repositories, but others do not, and adapting an LDAP backend to look at SugarCRM data is exactly consistent with what LDAP is. This would satisfy the desire of the initial poster on this thread, even if it does not allow people to use Sugar to interface to their existing corporate e-mail directories. It is still useful in that it allows LDAP clients, such as thunderbird or outlook, to access Sugar contacts.

Reviewing the backends for OpenLDAP on Wikipedia, there appear to be two existing backends that might be customized for this purpose. Neither require writing any code on the Sugar or LDAP sides besides an LDAP customization script that does not need compilation. The slapd-sql backend use some SQL script parameters in an LDAP configuration file to allow access to arbitrary SQL databases. This would appear to solve the issue of real time access to Sugar contacts from outside Sugar with a few lines of SQL and some database access parameters. Has anyone tried this?

Unfortunately, the slapd-sql backend is marked as 'experimental' and is said to be highly limited in its ability to access general schema and to update the database. Another backend, slapd-perl, appears to be best to implement this function in a way that is more adaptable and also seems like the best way to implement the reverse direction of updating the Sugar contact database using an LDAP compatible directory editor. A perl script is created to access the remote database. The script file is pointed at by an OpenLDAP configuration parameter to be used by a perl interpreter instance embedded into OpenLDAP. Has anyone out there tried this? Anyone familiar with perl and LDAP giving it a shot?
slapd-perl man page