[Ietf-carddav] carddav and corporate directories

[Arnaud Quillaud <[e-mail]>]

Hello,

Although it mentions LDAP in its introduction, the spec does not talk about the link between Corporate Directory access and CardDAV access.

Most PIM or email clients that would benefit from a CardDAV access also offer some access to corporate directories, usually LDAP directories. For an end user, they almost serve the same purpose (e.g. when sending an email, I may select some people from my personal address book and some from my corporate directory).

Nevertheless:
- configuring those clients is usually a real pain: server name and port, ssl or no ssl, base dn, search filter, bind dn, etc...
- each client has to deal with schema translation between the corporate directory schema and the internal representation.

Being able from CardDAV to discover public address books would greatly enhance the user experience. 
Being able to work against one format (vCard) instead of 2 (vCard + some LDAP schema) would ease development of address book enabled applications.


Arnaud Q