LDAP and the Address Book

Did you know that the Address Book in OS X supports vCards? Did you know that you can look up any NAU employee with LDAP and drag their vCard into the address book? This is nifty! Here's how you do it.

1. Open the Address Book application.

2. Select Address Book/Preferences... from the menu.

3. Click the LDAP tab as shown.

4. Click the "+" button to add an LDAP server.

5. Enter the name of your LDAP server (ours is ldap.nau.edu) and search base (ou=people, dc=nau, dc=edu) as shown and then click Save and close the Preferences window.

7. To create a group of contacts, choose File/New Group from the menu.

8. To search for people, select "Directories" and type a name (or partial name) in the search box, and you can look people up. Be sure to clear the search box to display all names again.

9. If you find the person you were looking for, drag their vCard from the Name column into the Group column as shown in the following movie (click the controller on the bottom left to play).

10. If you create a group of contacts that would be useful to others, you can export a vCard or group of vCards by selecting the card or group and then choosing File/Export... You can then e-mail the vCard(s) to them as an attachment and they just drag and drop the vCard(s) into their address book. Download the CTEL group as an example.

11. If you ever want to export your addresses to Excel or CSV (comma separated values) or some format other than vCard, try this nifty utility.