Directory Overview

In the following discussion we will be talking about directories and their role in an enterprise and explore the benefits of an enterprise directory service. If this material is new to you, this section provides an introduction to directories. If this material is familiar to you, we recommend that you look at it anyway, so you will be understand our terminology and conceptual view.

Describe directories and enterprise directory services. Explain how they are used in an enterprise.

What is a Directory?

     

What is a Directory Service?

If you've worked with iPlanet servers (formerly Netscape Servers) or attended our Directory Services: Analysis and Planning class, you're already familiar with directory services.

Benefits of an LDAP Based Enterprise Directory Service

One of the biggest benefits of an LDAP based enterprise directory service is that it is network accessible. This gives you a vehicle to connect users to very useful information. Also, because it is standards based, third-party products that are compliant to the standard can use the directory service right out of the box.

Implementing an Enterprise Directory Service

If LDAP is so good, why isn't it the enterprise directory service solution? The answer is that there are considerations that prevent LDAP, by itself, from providing a complete solution. For example, data that would be very useful if available in a directory service, is often contained in non-directory repositories. Examples of these foreign repositories include:

  • SQL (Oracle, Sybase)
  • People Soft 
  • Lotus Notes 
  • cc:Mail 
  • Proprietary data store 

So what do you do when you have data that would be useful if available through a directory service but it is kept in some other datastore? What do you do if you have data that can only be maintained and managed by certain departments (Human Resources, for example)? What happens when political considerations within an organization demand that certain data be owned by certain organizations? What do you do when you have a significant investment in existing, non-LDAP compliant, software?

Some additional service must be used to connect these disparate entities together. This service would translate or map data from one source (or type) into another. This is what iPlanet Meta-Directory (iMD) does. Interestingly, the repository that iMD uses to hold the data it consolidates from different sources is an LDAP data store. So the ultimate answer to the opening question is that LDAP is the enterprise directory service solution.

 

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