Manage central address books

Question

hi,
we are a small office with 5 users and bought leopard server. maybe somebody can help us with the following task:
we want to have a central repository of address, which anyone who subscribes to can use. i.e. add, edit, remove contacts and when not in the office view offline.
at the same time, each one will have its own local contacts in her local address book.
what do i need to do on the server and client side?
thanx for the help
philip

Answer 1

The Leopard Server administrator can set up user accounts and enter basic contact information. Read Chapter 5 - "Managing Users" - in the Leopard Server Getting Started Guide available here: http://images.apple.com/server/macosx/docs/GettingStartedv10.5.pdf The server administrator also has the capability of creating and editing shared contact information using the Directory application running locally on the server.
If your client workstations are running OS X Tiger (10.4.x), then users can access the shared contact info by adding the server as an LDAP directory to Address Book using "Preferences > LDAP". Once you've done this, after a user types the first two characters of a person's name in Address Book or Mail, the system will show all possible matches on the server. So, for example, if they type "Da", they'll see all the Dave's, Dan's, Dalton's, etc., listed on the server. Using this technique, there isn't a way to view the entire directory, however, the way you normally do in Address Book.
If you have Windows-based workstations, they can access the LDAP directory in a similar manner using Outlook or whatever mail program you happen to be using.
If you want to go one step further and allow your users to view the entire directory or create or edit their own shared directory entries, then they'll also need to be running Leopard (also referred to as "Leopard Client") in order to be able to run the "Directory" application. Before you upgrade your workstations to Leopard, I strongly advise that you first make full backups of your users systems, either as .sparseimages made to a Firewire drive or to the server. I recommend using Carbon Copy Cloner v2.5 or v3.0 (available at http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html). If you use this tool correctly, you'll have a recoverable image to fall back to in case there are any Leopard installation glitches.
Once you've installed Leopard on a workstation, you can connect the workstation to the server either at installation time, via an invitation e-mail, or using the Directory Utility. The Leopard Server Getting Started Guide describes the process in Chapter 6 - "Managing Users' Computers". Once you've done this, your users' account type will change to "Managed" in their System Preferences > Accounts pane. What this will enable them to do is run the Directory application in Leopard, which will allow them to view / add / edit shared contact information the way that I suspect you want.
Before you do all of this, you should read up a bit, I would think; the full suite of Leopard Server documentation is available here: http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/resources/
Hope this helps.