I'd like Fat Free CRM to store persons in LDAP.
LDAP search is fully integrated in Outlook 2010, iPhones, OSX
Mail, and basically every other client. Therefore LDAP is a very
suitable place to store an organization's canonical list of
persons.
On the other hand, there is not a lot of good interfaces around
to create and edit contacts in LDAP. Outlook/Exchange cannot do it,
for example, so this would be useful in all organizations that are
based on ActiveDirectory and Exchange. In that way, this could be
helpful in increasing the user base of Fat Free CRM.
Implementation-wise, ruby-activedirectory contains all the
support necessary for this, except that it's missing the "contact"
objectClass. That, however, should be a one-line change. Copy
user.rb to contact.rb and change the objectClass line of the schema
from reading 'user' to read 'contact'. (Optionally also remove the
items from schema that has to do with authentication, since that's
stuff that a user can do and a contact cannot.)
I'm thinking that the installation process should be:
1) Open Active Directory Users and Computers on a domain
controller.
2) Create a system user under the Users OU that Fat Free CRM can
authenticate itself with.
3) Create a 'Contacts' OU where contact persons are to be
stored.
4) Configure Fat Free CRM to authenticate to the AD via the above
user.
5) Open Fat Free CRM in a browser.
6) Create a new contact "blah"...
... and the contact would be created in LDAP under CN=blah,
OU=Contacts, DC=mycompany, DC=com