Secure Global Desktop Administration Guide > Organizing your resources > What is ENS?

What is ENS?

ENS, which stands for Enterprise Naming System, is the storage area for all the objects in your Secure Global Desktop organizational hierarchy.

ENS is arranged in a directory structure. At the top are the organization objects. Inside an organization there may be organizational units and other types of object such as person objects, document objects and application objects. Organizational units may themselves contain other objects, including more OUs.

ENS objects include attributes for Secure Global Desktop-specific behavior. For example, each person object has a Webtop Theme attribute that defines the look of the user's Webtop. Also, application objects and host objects combine to let you configure application server load balancing.

Each object has a unique name within ENS. The / character in a name separates containers (such as organization objects or organizational unit objects) from their contents. For example, the person object for Indigo Jones, which belongs to the organization object for Indigo Insurance, would have this name:

o=Indigo Insurance/cn=Indigo Jones

The "o=" (organization) and "cn=" (common name) parts of the name identify the attributes whose values distinguish the object from its siblings. In other words, in this example no other objects that belong to the organization object Indigo Insurance have common name Indigo Jones.

ENS is just one part of the Secure Global Desktop datastore: one namespace that may be used. To properly name an object, you need to use its Tarantella Federated Naming (TFN) name: this includes the namespace. A TFN name is a unique identifier for something in the Secure Global Desktop datastore. The person object for Indigo Jones has this TFN name:

.../_ens/o=Indigo Insurance/cn=Indigo Jones

Here ... identifies the "root" of TFN, and _ens the ENS namespace. Within that namespace, you use the ENS name.

Why does ENS matter?

ENS is just one namespace, corresponding to the Secure Global Desktop organizational hierarchy. There are many other namespaces, such as DNS and LDAP. ENS objects define Secure Global Desktop-specific behavior.

The flexibility of Secure Global Desktop allows different namespaces to be used where needed. For example, login authorities authenticate users in different ways: the ENS login authority searches ENS for matching person objects; the LDAP login authority searches the LDAP namespace for matching person objects, and uses an ENS object for Secure Global Desktop-specific behavior.

The integration of these different namespaces is powerful. This makes it important to understand where ENS fits, and what it's used for.

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