One reason that I have been away from the blog so long is that I have been pursuing my own minor, personal version of the Holy Grail of office computing — the universal address book, with partial success. (Are quests ever really achieved?)
One of my ambitions has always been to link a universal address book to my Palm Pilot, my email system, and my word processor/office suite and to be able to share it with my family. To that end, having tried a number of alternatives, I am currently attempting to configure OpenLDAP, Horde, and OpenOffice.org on my Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon system — soon to be Hardy Heron if all goes well. For extra good measusre, I have been experimenting with O3spaces and webdav for document management as well.
So far, I have mainly concluded that while LDAP may be very powerful, it is a beast to configure. And syncml is no walk in the park either.