On Jul 28, 2005, at 10:53 AM, Eric Thomas wrote:

> If I understood the requirement correctly, every time a user joins
> or leaves
> a list, you want LISTSERV to immediately connect to an LDAP server and
> update certain data in certain tables in a format that, I imagine,
> is only
> in use at Temple? :-) Well, I think it can be done, but not by adding
> "TEMPLE_PORTAL=1" to your configuration and restarting ;-) You
> would have to
> set up a list exit for every list and have that exit do the LDAP work.

Eric, you are correct. What would be great is to have a set of
keywords within Listserv to facilitate its integration with LDAP data
and portal products. Such a feature set would certainly not be
trivial to implement, but its worth thinking about. I also understand
your idea about using Listserv exits. I can't imagine why your list
exit idea would not work, but it is not particularly elegant, but it
is is good to have as an option.

Omer, your approach intrigues me. In fact, I just discussed this idea
with the director of our web portal project to see what his reaction
would be. I told him what I have in mind and about Omer's suggestion.
What I have in mind for each portal user is, at a minimum, to have a
tab on each user's web page which will identify each list to which
the person is subscribed, and maybe the most recent message that was
sent to each list. At this stage, I am not sure how, but we might
even be able to utilize the new RSS feature that became available to
us in Listserv 14.3. Being able to manage subscriptions via our new
portal would be nice too, but I want to focus on making the list's
available via the portal first and alerting portal users when new
postings are sent to each of their lists.

The director who manages our portal has authorized me to meet with
their lead software developer to see how quickly this kind of feature
can be implemented. I hope to have that meeting today or tomorrow.

In case anyone is curious, each time the status of someone who
applies to study here becomes a student here, his or her LDAP
information is assigned a flag which allows that person to go to an
account creation web site to validate their information, set up a
password, and create such resources as a portal account, email
account,  housing system account, etc. A similar process is applied
to those who apply for a job here and then get hired. The entry of
people into the university community (students, faculty, and staff)
all flows into a centralized LDAP database. What would be nice is if
Listserv could utilize that LDAP data to facilitate integration into
other online services here such as a trigger signing up students to
lists for their courses, and delete subscriptions as students drop
courses in real time and signing up faculty/staff to departmental
lists, and so on. Right now, a lot of this integration is done at
night via batch processes, but it is all headed toward a real time
paradigm over the next few years. This is why it would not be
possible or wise for me to propose offering a new service that
depends on batch processing.

Thanks Omer and Eric for your feedback, and also to W Brown.