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LDAPeople for iPhone

11.03.2009
Like a lot of IT people in a mostly-Mac company, my organization has a directory service set up to help manage our users and computers. In our case, it's Apple's Open Directory, which is based on LDAP, or the .

Open Directory is pretty cool, especially for maintaining the company contact list. Since we enter in work-related information for everyone when they start, everything we need as far as e-mail addresses, postal addresses, phone numbers, and so forth is right there. In Mac OS X 10.5, with , adding people's pictures is as easy as adding them in iChat.

This is all great, until you want to use this on the iPhone. It is immensely frustrating to have all this power in your iPhone, but still have to manually sync with iTunes (and re-sync regularly if you want to keep up to date), or run a third-party groupware server just to get access to the company directory listing. If you have 20 to 30 people, the iTunes requirement can be annoying. If you have a few hundred? Or more? Ugh-o-la.

Luckily, there's a product that helps you handle this lack of iPhone support from Apple: LDAPeople from . LDAPeople is a US$4 iPhone and iPod touch application that allows you to search and use contact information from your LDAP directory on your iPhone. That means you can access contact info on your iPhone without having to copy that data from your directory. You can also copy entries from your LDAP directory to your iPhone, if you want to save them for offline access.

Setting up LDAPeople to work in an Apple Open Directory environment is simple. You enter in a name for the configuration, the DNS name for the server, and the searchbase. So, with Open Directory, if your Open Directory Master's DNS name is odmaster.company.com, your LDAPeople searchbase would be cn=users,dc=odmaster,dc=company,dc=com. Including the "users" container makes it easier for LDAPeople to search for contact information, as it limits the amount of data needed, but it's not required.

If you have more advanced requirements, like authenticated binding, custom queries, custom base filters, and so on, there's an Advanced settings window where you can set these values as well. One point: LDAPeople does not yet support SSL, although Neoos is working on it. Nor does it support Kerberos as of yet, so if you need either of those for read-only access to your directory, then you'll have to wait to use LDAPeople.