Expose system address book

[schiessle]

This was motivated by how we manage our address book at c.nc.com with all the shortcomings. As you know it happens regularly that users delete/edit contacts by accident or add contacts to the address book which doesn't belong there. Also from a user perspective it is highly irritating that you have to keep your contact information up-to-date twice, in your personal settings and in the company address book. All information are available through the personal profile and we store it already as a address book because we use it for example to sync the user directories between trusted servers for federated sharing.

This PR makes this address book available in the contacts app and for other carddav clients, read-only. Following constraints apply to the address book and its visibility.

1. It is a opt-in admin settings. By default the system address book will not be visible. I implemented the setting and the default to tackle privacy issues, especially for long term users who doesn't expect a accessible system address book after the next update. I also hope that this addresses some concerns, mentioned here Show system address book as read-only address book in contacts #19575. The setting is in the admin "Groupware" section:

2. The system address book only contains information set to "public" or "trusted" by the user in their personal settings

3. All users are already searchable through the "people menu" which exposes additional information as well, like their email address, so there shouldn't be any privacy issue. Especially as the feature is opt-in and even than each user can tweak their privacy settings on the personal page.

fix #19575

PS: Please be nice to me, it is my first PR since almost two years 😉

[nickvergessen]

2. Is wrong, the privacy setting is only about federation and should not impact this. 🤷‍♂️

[nickvergessen]

The thing is e.g. with our company addressbook we store data that is not available from the ldap, e.g. birthday, private email, phone number, etc.

[nickvergessen]

Is this true? Because it shouldn't as per the privacy description on the fields.

[schiessle]

yes, the system address book was introduced explicitly for the trusted servers implementation and doesn't contain information set to "private". Just double checked it, to make sure it is still this way

[schiessle]

The thing is e.g. with our company addressbook we store data that is not available from the ldap, e.g. birthday, private email, phone number, etc.

Maybe we will lose some information in the first step, true. But stuff which can be useful in general could and should be added to the profile at some point anyway. For example you might want to show your birthday on your profile page in the social app, so it should be part of your personal setting's profile. At the end I think the advantages surpass the (temporarily) drawbacks.

Also nobody is forced to use it, if someone still prefer a full featured address book they can keep it as it is and don't enable the system address book.

Regarding phone numbers and other stuff not provided by LDAP, this can be added to the profile, even if other parameters come from LDAP. I tested it on c.nc.com

[skjnldsv]

One issue is how many entries it adds to the sharing suggestion :)

[
  {
    "shareWith": "Test03",
    "shareType": 0,
    "user": "Test03",
    "isNoUser": false,
    "displayName": "Test03",
    "icon": ""
  },
  {
    "shareWith": "Test03",
    "shareType": 0,
    "user": "Test03",
    "isNoUser": false,
    "displayName": "Test03",
    "icon": ""
  },
  {
    "shareWith": "[email protected]",
    "shareType": 6,
    "user": "Test01",
    "isNoUser": true,
    "displayName": "Test01",
    "desc": "on dev.skjnldsv.com",
    "icon": ""
  },
  {
    "shareWith": "[email protected]",
    "shareType": 6,
    "user": "Test02",
    "isNoUser": true,
    "displayName": "Test02",
    "desc": "on dev.skjnldsv.com",
    "icon": ""
  },
  {
    "shareWith": "[email protected]",
    "shareType": 6,
    "user": "Test03",
    "isNoUser": true,
    "displayName": "Test03",
    "desc": "on dev.skjnldsv.com",
    "icon": ""
  },
  {
    "isNoUser": true,
    "displayName": "Search globally",
    "lookup": true
  }
]

[nickvergessen]

Well we should ignore it in that case I guess

[jancborchardt]

Yep, the general rule is that a "person" should only be shown once. It doesn’t matter if it is via contacts, users, email etc → people care about sharing with another person no matter the means.

(This has been unified to some extent, and should be the same here. :)

[wiswedel]

Hey everyone. I have another inquiry for this kind of user profile exposition.
Is this PR moving forward?

[wiswedel]

I guess there's no interest in getting this into 21? 22 maybe? Otherwise please reject it but stop leaving us hanging out to dry.

[skjnldsv]

Is this PR moving forward?

Ask @schiessle?

[adamshand]

Has there been any progress on this? It would be very helpful if system users could show up in contacts!

[cybergitti]

I started NC with v22 and use the Registration app.
As an admin I am admitting the registrants one by one, but I cannot turn the the growing user list into an automatically growing "global address book". Very sad for many (at least admin ) use cases.

[Eweol]

Is this still in progress or will it not been implemented?

[ChristophWurst]

See #19575 and related work packages.