Customer vs Company

[plussier at mindspring.com]

In a message dated: Thu, 03 Apr 2003 11:07:08 CST
Linas Vepstas said:

>I've tried to use ldap on multiple occasions, and its always a mind-bending
>hassle.
>
>(I was tryig to use it instead of yellowpages, to manage user logins 
>across many machines.  Yuck.)

Yuck to yp or replacing yp with LDAP :)  They're both pretty messy in their own way!
The nice thing about LDAP is that it can be used in a lot more places 
than yp, and can act as a single sign-on back-end.  But as you say, 
it's messy (but can be done).

>> I merely see LDAP as a convenient mechanism to share directory
>> information with other LDAP aware applications. 
>
>My interest is in syncing my celphone address book to my evolution 
>address book, which BTW exists on multiple computers, etc.

The obvious solution is to not store the address book on several 
computers, but on one, to which all the others can connect to for 
directory service queries.  This is precisely where LDAP comes in.

>Today, the technology is messy, adhoc, uncertain, unclear.

Well, I think the technology is messy because directory services is 
a messy problem.  It's also one those areas where people see it 
solving one problem and then wish to bend it to solve other similar 
but not so exact problems.

LDAP seems messy I think because of it's X.500 roots. And I think 
it's more messy from the developer side than the user side.  Though 
however messy, it is standardized, and it is becoming quite pervasive.

>I don't see that gnucash neads to pave the way, here.

Need?  No, neat? Sure. I think it would be pretty cool in a small 
business environment to have a single database back end where the 
person doing the billing can generate reports on customers, vendors, 
etc from within GnuCash, then turn around and send e-mails to all 
those same entities from Evolution without having to maintain 2 sets 
of data.

-- 

Seeya,
Paul
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