What it is
 

Rolodap is an open source database for storing an organization's contacts information.  It uses PHP and LDAP. Rolodap has easy to use web interfaces. Features include :

• Usable in LDAP enabled emailers like Netscape, Eudora, or Outlook
• No special client software needed-- just a web browser and emailer
• Stores information such as notes, telephone, postal address
• Display of most common information in scrollable tabular form
• Supports creating wordprocessor merge files of postal addresses
• Simple search by user definable categories such as "customers", "courts", "suppliers" or "my contacts"
• Detailed search on any information
• Scalable
• Exports data to csv files for use in any WordProcessor for document merges.
• Exports data to csv files formated so that they can be imported into Palm based PDA's (and possibly others)
• Mailing feature that allow users to send highly customizable emails (the emails can contain field codes for names, addresses, etc so each message is customizable) to groups contacts, without each of the recipients knowing who the other recipients are.
• Themable color schemes that are easy to add schemes to
• Options to search other LDAP databases directly from the Rolodap interface.
  

Rolodap just reached the 1.0 release . The schema and the interface are pretty much stable, and we have made significant progress on the code. You can download Rolodap here:  http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=5384 .  This latest version contains pretty decent documentation on how to set it up and how to use it.

To use rolodap you will need an LDAP server (we currently use it with both openldap 1.2.9 and Iplanet's Directory server 4.5), a web server, and PHP 4.x or better (PHP 4 is required because of the session support that it offers).  If you want to use the email options you will also need to be able to access a SMTP server of some sort (either local on the machine or remote).  While in theory it should work on any OS that supports PHP 4, it has only been tested on Linux.

Once the package has been downloaded, copy the contents of ./rolodap/ to a folder called rolodap in your html document directory (the location doesn't matter as long as it is accessable by web users).  Next, copy ./rolodap/config/rolodap.conf to /etc/.  Then, edit the /etc/rolodap.conf file.  It should be fairly self explanatory.  Read the README for more information.  Also, there is a mini-howto available here: http://www.omaha.org/~adamh/rolodap_howto.html  there is also a local copy of it available from the files section of the Rolodap sourceforge page (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=5384).

Marcel Gagne also wrote a nice article in Linux Journal detailing setup.

If you have questions or comments please post them in the Open Discussion Forum, or contact me directly (Dan Freed -- rolodap@dewittross.net ).
 

Demo

There is a demo of Rolodap available here(http://www.dewittross.com/rolodap/) which can be viewed using the username: rolodaptest and the password: rolodaptest. 

( Unfortunately the demo is often down. We need a host for a demo -- we would need OpenLDAP and php4.x available. Offers gratefully received. )

While this version of Rolodap is far from complete, it gives a good idea of what the project will be capable of doing when it is complete. The demo database contains thousands of entries, but many of them are just duplicate data with unique uid's, this was done in order to quickly fill out the database to test rolodap with as big of a database as we could. Don't be concerned if you see a dozen people with the same name, they are all unique entries, just with the same data.

Screenshots

New

Old

Basic Search Page
Advanced Search Page
User's Home Page

We would be glad of your participation in the design process.  An Open Discussion forum is available.

The project is located on sourceforge at http://sourceforge.net/project/?group_id=5384
 

There is a similar related project called ldap-abook

05/14/00
 

More on User Interface
More on Schema
More on Data Entry