Share contacts/accounts with e-mail clients via LDAP address book

[nurfz]

I'd love to share the EspoCRM contacts and accounts with e-mail clients in our company. Read-only would be OK for now.

I know that I can also send/receive e-mails within Espo but many people prefer to use their own e-mail client.

I think, using OpenLDAP as adress book directory service would be a good way.
Have anyone ever tried this? Do you have other ideas to share the address book?

I think it's not easy for me to configure LDAP with the back-sql extension (which can access the MySQL database). I will share results if I succeed.

Resources:
- https://linux.die.net/man/5/slapd-sql
- http://www.openldap.org/faq/data/cache/978.html

[nurfz]

I got a different solution now: I don't use LDAP. Setting up a server only for an address book seems pretty complicated.

I use a vCard (.vcf file) server instead.

Radicale https://radicale.org/ is such a server. It's easy to install on Linux.

1. Start the service, go to http://localhost:5232 and create an empty vCard address book.
2. Go to /var/lib/radicale/collections/collection-root/USERNAME/UUID/ and here you can place the vCard files.
3. Connect to Thunderbird address book with CardBook or (IMO better) TbSync + Provider for CalDAV & CardDAV

The vCard files can be generated from a CSV dump of your Espo adresses. This can be automated with a cronjob.

I unsuccessfull tested two converters for csv2vcf:
- https://github.com/mridah/csv2vcf (only supports very few vCard fields)
- https://github.com/Moduland/csv2vcf (doesn't work from command line for me)

Then I wrote this converter which requires the Haskell Stack tool to run:

https://gist.github.com/schoettl/2f1786697aca978dadc55a27a305bde2

... and the program must be configured for a EspoCRM export. Currently it's used for another CRM system.

Not extremly easy but maybe it helps someone...