Is there such a thing as a "standard" contacts book?

[Avi]

David Fletcher wrote:
> 
> Now, what I would love to see is a solution that I can run locally on
> my server that does the same goodness for an address book as maildir
> and IMAP has done for my email.

The 'obvious' solution is LDAP - it's sort-of what it's designed for.
It's also horrific to do by hand, so what you really want is something
that wraps some LDAP implementation in something sane. 

It might be worth looking for a single 'groupware' thing, which will
take care of mail, contacts and calendaring (and probably a bit more)
unless part of the point is configuring the individual bits. Something
like Zimbra might be worth a look. I only know of it in terms of an
Exchange replacement, but I assume it talks to clients in standards,
too.


-- 
Avi