One of the minor frustrations of my cyber-life is the lack of a universal address book. My hypothetical requirements seem deceptively simple: a cross-device, cross-platform, and cross-application central address book. In other words, I could enter address, phone, fax, and email information once and then access it in any device in both my email clients and my word processors and text editors. Simple, right? Not so very.
As it stands, there seem to be three major alternatives, none of which is quite satisfactory: LDAP, Caldav/Carddav, and whatever the hell Microsoft Exchange has under the hood. LDAP is widely accepted and reputedly is efficient and scales well. However, it is a beast to configure, finicky, and seems to lack a consistent format. Carddav seems to be simpler and more uniform but is not as widely available — for example, Mozilla Thunderbird at least works partially with LDAP, but not at all with Carddav. And Microsoft, well Microsoft seems mostly to want to play only with Microsoft (although the iPhone admittedly integrates nicely with Exchange).
Even if I can mostly get my different email clients — Outlook, Horde, Evolution, Thunderbird, and Emacs — to share at least one of the above databases and to sync with at least some of the others, the word processor situation seems to be pretty hopeless. I would like to be able to click a mouse or tap a key and insert the relevant address information from my universal address book into whatever it is I am typing: an email, a fax, or a letter. At various times, I use Word, WordPerfect, Libreoffice, and Emacs, but I have yet to find a fully satisfactory solution for any of them, much less for all of them.