The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Miles Fidelman <address@concealed>]

I'm trying to figure out how to coordinate sympa databases with a larger
database.  The specific application is a school parent-teacher
organization - where we have a database of students/parents, which
includes name, address, phone, and other information as well as email
addresses.  The database will drive multiple applications - including
email lists, but also printing mailing lables, generating member
directories, and so on.

We're trying to figure out our options for keeping our email lists in sync
with the larger database without manually moving data back and forth
(including such things as notating bouncing email addresses).

So far the choices seem to be:
- use the sympa database, add fields
- define lists to include data from an external sql database
- define lists to include data from an external ldap server

Clearly the first choice will work, though managing access rights to the
data will get tricky if we allow direct access to the database, going
around wwsympa access controls (i.e., since all the data is owned by
sympa.sympa - it gets tricky to provide selective access to subsets).

So... I'd like to keep the data in an external database or ldap server, bu
that leads me to a few questions about how sympa and wwsympa deal with
data stored externally? For example:

- does sympa store any info about included users in its own database?

- how are passwords dealt with, do they have to be managed completely
through the external database or can sympa still assign first-time
passwords and allow users to update them?

- what about assigning privileges to users?

- what about users setting their profiles for things like text/html,
mail/digest, etc.?

Are there any documents I can read to get more details of sympa's
interaction with external sources?

Thanks very much,

Miles Fidelman


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