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LDAP integration with popular groupware suites

In the Directory

Article from ADMIN 28/2015

By Andrej Radonic

Your LDAP directory holds user data for the whole network. Why not save time and avoid duplication by integrating the LDAP directory with your groupware environment?

Groupware systems promote collaboration and save time by consolidating essential communication, calendaring, and coordination services in a single interface. The groupware application provides these services to a database of users and manages these users through user profiles, login credentials, and other identifying information. But many organizations today already maintain a network-wide user directory through LDAP that provides universal login and also tracks security privileges and personal data. If groupware is all about saving time by combining and consolidating effort, why maintain a groupware user database that is separate from the data maintained through the LDAP directory service?

If the services on your network all fall within the same vendor orbit, such as the tools of the Microsoft Active Directory ecosystem, coordination of groupware with the directory is relatively seamless. If, however, your network consists of independent, open source components, or if the services network came online at different times, you'll need to expend a little more effort to interface your groupware with LDAP. In this article, I highlight some important considerations for LDAP integration with some leading open source groupware alternatives.

Table 1 compares the LDAP support in the open source groupware tools Open-Xchange [1], Tine 2.0 [2], Zarafa [3], Kolab [4], EGroupware [5], Scalix [6], and Zimbra [7]. The individual systems differ visibly in the options implemented through LDAP. The lowest common denominator is authentication via

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