I use to work with ERP databases and in every ERP database, you have a customer table and a vendor table. Quite often, people were telling me that it would be nice to be able to use those tables to centralize the customer and vendor information.

One of the main reason for this centralization was the sharing of information concerning contact address. Quite often, people have those details located in there local address book. Sometimes, this is saved in a central adress book independent from the ERP databases or other databases.

Recently, I discover Penrose. Penrose let you wrap your relational database with an ldap layer (In fact, it does more than that but let’s keep simple).

Using Penrose studio, you can map your relational database fields with ldap attributes. You upload the configuration to the Penrose server. Then you can add an additional LDAP address book to your favorite email client by connecting it to the Penrose Server and it’s done. You have access to the detail contact information located in your central database.