Quick Tour 1 - Application: An Intranet Directory

The Directory

Below is the directory at the top level:

Most of the folders you can see contain groups: campaigns, committees, offices, organisational units and roles (organisational roles, not Zope/Plone roles) . Contacts go in the "People" folder. "Contact Directory Listing" is just a smart folder for contacts that looks like a directory, like this:

(the fourth and fifth columns are phone numbers).

Contact Information

A summary view of a contact showing two important groups that the contact is in: their organisational unit ("department") and their office. The "State" box can be used to change the status of contact into staff members or visa versa. Contacts and groups are fully workflowable.

Staff and volunteer can edit some of their details, such as their biography and contact details.

The "Show More Details" link shows, amongst other things, the complete set of groups, such as campaigns, committees and organisational "roles", that this contact is involved in:

Group Information

Below is a view of a group (an office in this case). The information for groups is specifically tailored to work well with standard LDAP schemas.

As can be seen above, backlinks to group members and managers are also available for each group (although somewhat blurred :-) ). Like contacts, groups can be workflowed. In the simplest case, they are simply disabled or enabled. Disabled group are not exported to LDAP in this application.

Messaging

You may have noticed that contacts, groups and even the top-level directory have a "Messaging" tab. These are for email and SMS messaging (via an SMS-Email gateway) of some or all people in the corresponding group:

The form keeps track of the length for your SMS message, updating the length as you type each character.

LDAP

This application regularly exports its contacts and groups to an LDAP server. The resulting LDAP repository is then used for authentication and group-based authorisation in other systems that have LDAP integration. The LDAP server can also be used as an address book in clients such as Thunderbird, Evolution and Outlook. Here is an example in Thunderbird:

Although it hasn't been attempted yet, we believe that we can extend this system to control mail servers such as Postfix and QMail, mailing list applications, and even be used to control Windows and UNIX authentication in LANs.