I would like to use our Filemaker members database as the only store for email addresses and make those addresses visible to our desktop email clients. I am thinking that this should be accomplished through an LDAP directory of some sort but am clueless as to how to make this happen.

We are running Filemaker Server 7 hosted on Windows Server 2003. Seems like their ought to be a way to marry Active Directory with our database so we don't have to maintain our list in multiple places.

Can someone give me some pointers...I am new to this stuff.

Apologies if this is not the right forum for this post.

Active Directory is an LDAP directory service. If your desktop email clients can read data from AD then all you need to do is synch your FM file with AD. But that may get complex in a hurry.

Since this is all Windows I wouldn't use LDAP but ADSI (unless you already know LDAP). The complexity will be in :

- executing ADSI queries against your AD (you'll need VBscript to do this)

- figuring out rules about handling changed data, new data, deleted data

- setting up some sort of schedule inside FM to requery AD and update it.

In effect you will always have 2 stores: AD and your FM file. There is no way your email apps cacn query AD who then queries your file. The challenge is in synching both date stores.