[Vtigercrm-developers] vtiger + LDAP/Active Directory

[Alan Lord (News)]

Hi all,

One of our customers (we do work on Alfresco for them) emailed this morning:

"
Hi Alan

I’m looking at vTiger at the moment to either replace SugarCRM or use in 
another product, I know you are quite a fan of it so I was hoping you 
could give me a pointer on something.  I have an instance of vTiger 
5.2.0 RC installed now I am trying to hook it into our Active Directory, 
from the documentation (wasn’t great) and the forum it appears the only 
way to do this is to implement a patch that was developed for version 
5.0.4 by a developer who has since left posting a slightly hot tempered 
final message on how badly vTiger was written...is there an easy (or 
any) way to do it?
"

So I did some digging and came up with this:

http://trac.vtiger.com/cgi-bin/trac.cgi/ticket/5372

and a couple of helpul comments at the end of this forum thread:

http://forums.vtiger.com/viewtopic.php?t=21992&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=10

I suggested my customer test this on vtiger 5.1.0 first and to let me 
know how they got on...

"
Thanks for the info, I'll install a 5.1.0 instance and see how I get on 
with the patches, I know you don't like Sugar but one of the main 
advantages is that it has LDAP built in and easily configurable.  If you 
have any input into vTiger you may want to put that in as a feature 
request, there seems to be a lack of documentation on it and quite a 
number of people on the forums asking the question.
"

About 1 hour later...

"
Ok, I got the package installed and the LDAP patch configured, it is 
relatively simple however the document doesn't include anything to 
mention that you have to edit the config.ldap.php file, it literally 
says copy the files and your done (in the previous section it does talk 
about setting up an LDAP server on Linux from scratch, the details that 
it tells you to configure are the same as in the config file.  So the 
documentation is only really useful to someone configuring LDAP 
specifically to run with vTiger.

It works ok the only downside I can see is that it doesn't appear 
capable of searching an entire tree you have to specify an OU which 
would mean we would have to set up vTiger instances for each company. 
This can be an issue for a company like ours where many different people 
from across the organisation may need to access it.
"

So it seems as though this works but could do with a little TLC (tender 
loving care).

This is the second time in a couple of days I've been asked about Single 
Sign On facilities and this would appear to be a good start.

Can I suggest that we stick this on the forge and see if we can get some 
community help to turn it into a useful module that can be installed via 
the Module manager (vtlib), works on 5.2.0 and that we tidy up the 
documentation? I'd also like to take a look at his need to spanning OUs 
although I am *not* a LDAP guru so help here would be handy.

Cheers

Al

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The Open Learning Centre
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