Here's an idea I have been pitching at Market Circle for a long time and I wanted to see if others supported it.

Currently all of my organization's most up to date contact info is in DayLite and that's great. However, that information is not really accessible system-wide to all other applications. Some of it can be if I were to regularly sync my addressbook but I have found that to be very problematic and besides not all applications can access addressbook.

Therefore, why not create an LDAP server from the DayLite contact/organization database? That way ANY application that uses contact info could be configured to connect to the DayLite contact/organization database via LDAP.

Thoughts?

That seems like an interesting idea, ignoring for the moment the feasibility of it.

As I see it, the more core OS technologies and open source stuff Daylite keys into, the better all round.

Take HUDs, for instance, by leveraging Web Kit you can easily customise the UI to do a wide range of tasks that are simply too specialised for Marketcircle to consider.

Another great example of this, is the text editor Textmate, which in a very short time has generated quite a following by having a very open architecture that 3rd parties can expand and build upon.

A Daylite-based LDAP server/client is a great example of the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle.

+1 on this request.

A built-in LDAP server would be tremendously useful.

+1 from me too.

(now if it were also possible to authenticate logged in users against an OpenDirectory server such as that found on Mac OS X Server... :-)

Actually (pipe-dreaming here) what would be seriously nice would be integration with this phone system I've been considering as it delivers Applescript-able soft phones to the Mac OS X desktop alongside the usual hardware phones...

http://www.splicecom.com/

with DayLite/OpenBase acting as an LDAP directory data source and a direct dial out facility tied in with the phone system's logging and recording features it would make a killer combination :-)

Rob Telford wrote:
(now if it were also possible to authenticate logged in users against an OpenDirectory server such as that found on Mac OS X Server... :-)

Exactly ! Open Directory/LDAP integration is the standard means of authentication and centralized user management. More and more multi-user apps are going this route, and it is a huge selling feature for large/enterprise deployments. Not only is Daylite well positioned (from a functionality perspective) to adopt this as an option, but it would add immense value to the product !

Ditto. Apple calls it 'single sign-on' when you can authenticate to everything at once. As a first step consider that we can presently export a User list from either Daylite or Directory Services (OS X Server) and import it into the other. It would be sweet to actually integrate with Directory Services to create a user in both at once, or copy a user from one to the other. Then a coup-de-grace would be single-sign-on.

A great benefit of this would be the ability to use Group memebership to simplify and/or pre-define User permissions in both environments.

I would also really like to see this feature. It's a bit of a pain having all our contacts in Daylite but not available in Apple Mail or other programs that can access LDAP.

We also have the login issue to consider and single sign in to Open Directory would make things so much simpler from an administration point of view.

quote:

Originally posted by Rob Telford:
Actually (pipe-dreaming here) what would be seriously nice would be integration with this phone system I've been considering as it delivers Applescript-able soft phones to the Mac OS X desktop alongside the usual hardware phones...

http://www.splicecom.com/

with DayLite/OpenBase acting as an LDAP directory data source and a direct dial out facility tied in with the phone system's logging and recording features it would make a killer combination :-)

Rob, you should take a look at PhoneValet: http://www.parliant.com/phonevalet/
While its not a VoIP product, there is considerable dial integration. In conjunction with DayPhone (http://www.gammastream.com/products/dayphone/index.html) you get a powerful yet flexible integrated Daylite based dialing solution !

Neat product, but I don't think it suits our requirement (~50 users with ISDN30 into the building).

:-)

I just wanted to add my support for everything you guys have said. I really think that DL is a powerful tool and wide scale integration would make it an even more killer app!

Oh, and IMHO I do happen to think that integration with VOIP would probably prove to be a huge boon to DL. Let's see Asterisk or something like that...

George:

My office currently runs Asterisk and Daylite and it works pretty well. It would be better if my laptop could pick up the incoming call on my SNOM (they are connected together via a pass through ethernet cable on the phone) and use the caller id information to bring up a selection of possible contacts related to that incoming number. This would make it much easier to keep conversations in Daylite since the contact's information would be one click away.

Back to reality, I use Jon's Phone Tool very successfully, to dial numbers in Daylite. This works whether my laptop is running on the network using the aforementioned wired network solution or if I am on WiFi. I can say that the Asterisk/Daylite combination is very good along with JPT as the glue.

I would prefer to see a Daylite plugin instead of JPT. Not because of any problems with JPT but because I think that we could get additional and very targeted functionality for Daylite telecom solutions.

J. Scott:

Thanks for that report. It is encouraging. I should mention that I've demoed JPT as well. Like you, I think a direct DL solution would be a bit better. Personally, I found JPT to be enormous overkill (for dialing with Vonage) and a bit annoying in the way that it is always opening itself up. But that's just my opinion.

Just stumbled across this and wanted to add my +1 for ability to talk LDAP, especially with OpenDirectory. Not that Daylite advertising its own LDAP database wouldn't be useful as well, just most of the Daylite implementations I've done have started out in a single department or segment of an organization that already has an XServe managing contacts throughout the rest of the place. It's always been tricky keeping the Daylite users in sync with everyone else. This would be killer. I guess one issue might be how much "power" modifications made in Daylite have when talking to the OpenDirectory Master. If I change the spelling of your name accidentally in Daylite what does that mean for you and your OD account? I don't know enough about the technical gotchas so for now I'm going with "awesome idea!" =)

quote:

Ohttp://www.splicecom.com/

with DayLite/OpenBase acting as an LDAP directory data source and a direct dial out facility tied in with the phone system's logging and recording features it would make a killer combination :-)

Just a little follow-up as we have now gone live with the Splicecom Maximiser phone system.

I spent a little time with the DayLite Developers' Kit and, using the Jon's Phone Tool Dialer Plugin source code provided, hacked one for DayLite to dial out directly using the PCS50 soft-phone (making changes to a couple of the variables and the embedded Applescript sufficed for this purpose).

This obviously doesn't address the issue of having to maintain separate contact directories in DayLite and the phone system or to identify incoming calls, which might be solved by an LDAP option for serving the DayLite data, but it gets us some useful functionality.

Sorry to be hijacking the thread, Nick, but I'll add my enthusiastic support for integration with the Open Directory or Active Directory LDAP services for user authentication in a DayLite networked environment. We're very excited about the product in our testing but as we move from a couple of users testing it out to many users in the organization wanting to use it it would be great to be able to manage the user names, passwords, and authorization centrally with LDAP.