If you don't need SSL or Kerberos for read-only access to your LDAP contact information, then LDAP people is a decent tool. You punch in a name, and it returns basic contact info. You can customize the LDAP attributes LDAPeople uses, (but not the LDAPeople fields), and LDAPeople will use the Open Directory picture for people, if you have them. A sample of what you get with LDAPeople is shown on the right. The screenshot doesn't show a postal address or URL, and I've blurred out some other information.

Using the contact information LDAPeople gives you access to is intuitive. Tap on an e-mail entry, you get a new mail message to that person. Tap on the phone number, you call that number. Tap on the URL, you go to that web site, tap on a postal address, and you get Google Maps for that address. So there's a fairly high level of integration between LDAPeople and the rest of the iPhone applications. One thing to keep in mind is that none of this is cached, unless you manually import an entry into your iPhone address book. If you can't connect to your LDAP server, LDAPeople is not able to function.

There are a few things I'd like to see changed, mostly fit and finish. First, you can't browse an LDAP contact list, you have to search. That's somewhat minor, but it can be annoying. There's no auto-complete, and if you have extensions in your phone number--say (555) 555-5555 ext. 333--then LDAPeople shows it as "5555555555ext333". It will try to dial all 13 numbers if you tap on it, which, in the U.S., means you still have to dial the extension manually. It would also be nice if I could add custom fields to LDAPeople itself, instead of just mapping fields to the list of what LDAPeople ships with. Finally, it would be nice to be able to better handle Open Directory's multiple value per attribute fields.

However, in spite of its shortcomings, and assuming you can consistently connect to your LDAP server, LDAPeople has been a really useful tool for me, and it's one that lets me actually get to my Apple Open Directory contacts from my Apple iPhone, something that Apple still can't manage to do.

LDAPeople is compatible with any iPhone or iPod touch running the iPhone 2.x software update.