[Kroupware] edirectory & kroupware

[Thomas Lotterer]

On Sun, Jan 25, 2004, Ruairi Hickey wrote:

Ruairi,

> I'm looking at kroupware with a view to an instalation / roll-out in
> summertime.  As all our users are already in a novell e-directory tree I
> was hoping to have kolab auth off of this.
> 
I'm also interested in this topic but didn't try it so I cannot report
success. However, in the past quarter I learned a lot about Kolab. I
also know and activly work with eDirectory/NDS from day one which is
more than a decade now.

By using slurpd the Kolab engine gets information about directory
updates the same way a OpenLDAP replica does. Replication works very
much in a proprietary way as it was never meant to be addressed by the
LDAP "standards". It is therefore impossible to replace OpenLDAP with
eDirectory without doing major changes to the Kolab engine.

Half a year ago I would have tried to go the DirXML way, but now there
seems to be a better way.

Coldfusion wrote a replacement for the Kolab engine. It is split into
functional parts and the communication to the Directory backend is
one of these parts. There is a implementation for Active Directory
available. It gets information about directory updates by registering
asynchronous search function LDAP_SERVER_NOTIFICATION_OID [1].

I don't know and haven't verified if eDirectory supports that kind of
asynchronous search. In the worst case a new backend would have to be
written which leverages eDirectory persistent search feature [2][3].

[1] http://www.alvestrand.no/objectid/1.2.840.113556.1.4.528.html
[2] http://developer.novell.com/research/appnotes/2003/february/04/a0302045.htm
[3] http://www.novell.com/documentation/lg/ndsedir86/taoenu/data/acl2ehr.html

--
Thomas.Lotterer at cw.com, Cable & Wireless