Many companies provide LDAP for various aspects, like authentication. A company I know uses LDAP for their address book. In deploying the Evolution email client in a Linux environment we needed to add the LDAP analog to the addressbook in order to have autocomplete aid the users with recipient addresses.
Here is the procedure I used to set up the addressbook to use the company LDAP system:
- Open Evolution
- Click on Contacts in the left menu bar
- There is a down arrow next to the “New” button in the task-bar. Click on the down arrow and select”Address Book.”
- A “pop-up” window will appear
- Type = On LDAP Servers
- Name = “whatever you want to call it”
- Server = “name of the ldap server”
- Use secure connection: Select – > No encryption. This is an internal LDAP addressbook, so you are authenticated through the email server.
- Click on the Details tab
- Click on “Find Possible Search Bases.”
- You should see dc=”something”,dc=”something”. Select that and press OK. If the “Find Possible Search Bases” return a value you know you are connected to the LDAP server.
- Search scope: Select Sub
- Click OK at the bottom. This concludes the basic LDAP setup. If you want to test the configuration all you need is to type part of a name in the “search” box on the page and it should return results.
- Now we need to set up the Mail portion of LDAP.
- Next Click on Mail on the left side menu.
- Edit-> Preferences -> Autocompletion
- Under “On LDAP Servers” select “what ever you called it in the Name section”
- Then close the Preferences box.
You should be good-to-go at this point. When you start a new message you will start to receive autocompletion addresses. If you do not, I would recommend you first restart Evolution. If that does not work you will want to verify all your LDAP settings with the systems administration team.
I hope this helps someone out with setting up a company LDAP addressbook.
Mike Kniaziewicz, MIS