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