I’ve shied away from psoting during the last few weeks. The main reason is that I just haven’t progressed with the LDAP issues that beset me a couple of weeks back.
We’ve tried lots of port redirection and the like, but in the end we just can’t seem to force the remote workers laptops to send LDAP requests down the VPN.
Well, i focussed on something else for a week and attended my C# programming course with Learning tree, and on the last day of the Course, I had another Epiphany!… Web Services..
Basically, we take the LDAP lookups out of the spreadsheet, and move the whole shooting match, lock stock and 2 smoking barrels to the Web Server.
I’ve spent this morning coding the new web service and it’s now live on the SharePoint server housed within the same AppPool as the MOSS web services.
It’s function, well for now at least, all it does is offer a method called IsMemberOf(userName,groupName) and expects just a Username and a Groupname. It compares one with membership of the other and returns True or False accordingly..
Now I just have to consume the service within Excel 2003.. I’m downloading the web Services toolkit as we speak and I’ll update you soon…
As ever.. watch this space.