cross platform shared address book

October 10, 2008 6:29 AM

What is the best / easiest shared cross platform shared address book solution out there?

I'm a part of a small organization (50 people) spread across the country. Our company uses Linux (Thunderbird), Mac (Mail.app) and Windows (Outlook). What is the best solution to setup that will allow all of use to share a common contact list? I'm assuming LDAP will be used for address lookups but what is the best way to allow people to add entries. If not a LDAP based solution, what else can we use?

posted by cowmix to computers & internet (2 answers total)

What do you use behind the scenes? Is it an Active Directory network? If not, you can still expose LDAP however you like, as the instructions above illustrate you can use whatever LDAP sources you want with all three of those mail clients. I'd suggest some SSL/TLS to be mixed in there for good favor.
posted by rhizome at 9:30 AM on October 10, 2008

The best solution, but probably not the easiest, would be to get all three platforms to standardize on Thunderbird for their email / contacts. Then you could relatively easily set up an LDAP server to handle the synchronization of address books.
posted by mrbarrett.com at 11:50 AM on October 10, 2008