Highrise + Penrose = Address Book Nirvana

I love 37signal products. I use BackpackIt to organize my personal tasks. I use Basecamp to manage my projects and clients. Recently, 37signal introduced Highrise, a simple contact sharing web-app. You can forward your e-mail conversations to Highrise and it will know how to append the conversations to the right contact. This is a great lead/sales tracking tool, in other words, salesforce.com killer!

Would it be nice if you can lookup Highrise contacts in your e-mail clients (Thunderbirds, Outlook Express, etc.) or address book? It turns out that there’s an ubiquitous way to look-up remote contacts on all of these clients. It is through directories/LDAP protocol.
Here is Apple Address Book directory configuration:

The combination of Highrise and Penrose allows users to lookup Highrise contacts thru LDAP. As you know, Penrose provides a light-weight LDAP service on top of identity silos, such as databases. The database to LDAP transformation is done in a real-time. No migration and synchronization is needed.
P.S: We have built a prototype for a telco environment. As you know, telco has the most stringent requirements, both from performance and scalability standpoints. So, Jason is you are reading this and interested in getting our help for Penrose implementation, give us a buzz. We’d love to work with you.