What is LDAP?
| Lightweight Directory Access Protocol |
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A typical LDAP server is a simple network-accessible database where an organization stores information about its authorized users and what privileges each user has. Thus rather than create a new employee an account on 50 different computers, the new employee is entered into LDAP and granted rights to those 50 systems. If the employee leaves, revoking all privileges is as simple as removing one entry in the LDAP directory. LDAP is a bit confusing because original implementations were presented as alternatives to Web and the relational database management system. Nowadays many LDAP servers are implemented using standard RDBMSes underneath and they talk to the rest of the world via XML documents served over HTTP. Q: Why should I use LDAP? LDAP is now the standard for providing access to directory information like company phone/email directories. It is also being used to act as a gateway to other electronic information systems as a meta-directory by companies like Ford and Home Depot to deploy their intranet/extranet systems. It is poised to become the standard lightweight database for the Internet, much like the Berkeley database became for UNIX. |
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