UQ Address Book

UQ Address Book - LDAP - Setup Guides

What is UQ Address Book?
How do I set it up?
Glossary

What is UQ Address Book?

The UQ Address Book is a central e-mail address book for the UQ community. It is built on the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, called LDAP for short.

The UQ Address will provide a UQ email address (@uq.edu.au/@student.uq.edu.au) for most of the staff and all of the currently enrolled students here at the University. It will not provide an faculty email address for a staff member. Ie. if the person you are interested in has an email address "john.citizen@its.uq.edu.au", the UQ Address book does not store those email addresses.

It is up to individual staff members to either collect their UQ email, or to arrange with ITS to have their UQ email redirected to an email address that they do read.

UQ respects your privacy. You can control the information that the UQ Address Book will show. You can prevent your email address from being shown, or even hide your details entirely if you wish.

To control what is shown by the UQ Address book, you will need to log into the my.UQ Web Portal. Near the top of the page, there is a tag called 'Personalise' If you click on that, then the 3rd category down from the top is called 'myDetails' There are then options of 'Private' and 'Public' for each of the items that the UQ Address Book can display. Once you have selected the options that you wish, go to the bottom of the page and hit the 'Save' button.

What is a UQ

?

Shortly after commencing work, most staff will be given a UQ

which is a username and password. (You may come across the term “Kerberos ID” which refers to the software that manages storage and verification of your id and password). (Please Note. Some part time and casual staff do not automatically get a UQ Sign In).

Attached to this account UQ staff receive University Central email address (@uq.edu.au).

More information about UQ

can be found on the UQ Sign-In page.

How to Set Up UQ Address Book?

Guides are available for popular email software.

UQ Address Book (LDAP) Setup Guides
Windows Microsoft Outlook 2000 Microsoft Outlook 2002/XP Microsoft Outlook 2003 Microsoft Outlool Express 5.x - 6.x Eudora 5.2 Mozilla 1.x / Netscape 7 Macintosh OSX Microsoft Entourage Macintosh Mail Mozilla/Netscape 7 Eudora 5.1 Macintosh OS9 Microsoft Outlook Express 5 Mozilla Eudora 5.1

UQ Address Book (LDAP) Setup Guides

Windows

Macintosh OSX

Macintosh OS9

Glossary

LDAP, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, is an Internet protocol that email programs use to look up contact information from a server. As soon as Internet email became popular, it was clear we needed a good phone book. Printed directories were obsolete before the ink was dry. Older Internet methods of looking up names, such as whois, Ph, or finger, were limited or arcane. Every email program has a personal address book, but how do you look up an address for someone who's never sent you email? How can an organization keep one centralized up-to-date phone book that everybody has access to?

That's why software companies such as Microsoft, IBM, Lotus, and Netscape agreed to support a standard called LDAP. "LDAP-aware" client programs can ask LDAP servers to look up entries in a wide variety of ways. LDAP servers index all the data in their entries, and "filters" may be used to select just the person or group you want, and return just the information you want. For example, here's an LDAP search translated into plain English: "Search for all people located in Chicago whose name contains "Fred" that have an email address. Please return their full name, email, title, and description." (However, many email clients have more limited search and retrieval options.)

"Permissions" are set by the administrator to allow only certain people to access the LDAP database, and optionally keep certain data private. LDAP servers also provide "authentication" service, so that web, email, and file-sharing servers (for example) can use a single list of authorized users and passwords.

LDAP was designed at the University of Michigan to adapt a complex enterprise directory system (called X.500) to the modern Internet. A directory server runs on a host computer on the Internet, and various client programs that understand the protocol can log into the server and look up entries. X.500 is too complex to support on desktops and over the Internet, so LDAP was created to provide this service "for the rest of us."

LDAP servers exist at three levels: There are big public servers such as BigFoot and Infospace, large organizational servers at universities and corporations, and smaller LDAP servers for workgroups.

You probably already have an LDAP-aware client installed on your computer. Most modern email clients are set up to search an LDAP directory for email addresses. These include Outlook, OS X Mail, Eudora, Netscape, QuickMail Pro, and Mulberry. LDAP has broader applications, such as looking up services and devices on the Internet (and intranets). Netscape Communicator can store user preferences and bookmarks on an LDAP server. There is even a plan for linking all LDAP servers into a worldwide hierarchy, all searchable from your client.

LDAP promises to save users and administrators time and frustration, making it easy for everyone to connect with people without frustrating searches for email addresses and other trivia.