Dear Jimmy,
Let me add my personal answers. Hi, Similar to a lot of previous threads, I too am trying to setup an internal directory lookup of staff. My initial thought was to use an LDAP server for this, whether it be openLDAP, Sun's Directory server, Microsoft ADAM, or whatever. I've ran into some issues and am now wondering if using a LDAP server was the correct road to go down. Any comments and suggestions on the following would be greatly appreciated. - One of the main driving forces is to have a web accessible client. We've found Novell's eGuide to be a pretty good tool, however, the inability to find competitive products lead me to think that the demand in this area is low, or that everyone must just write their own? Every commercial provider of LDAP technology hat its own White Pages and its own administration products. Often they are part of Suites. - We're doing an initial load of data from a CSV file dumped from our HR system. The on-going maintenance portion is what we're having a problem with. Again, the lack of products that does LDAP management is surprising. Tech savvy people can use phpLDAPAdmin, but what of the non-tech HR people? We're not planning to allow self updates, just reads. The most used technique is a synchronization from the HR. This is valid if your organization has more than say 1000 users. A few attributes can be self-service but the security related are always maintained centrally. TO maintain several thousand attributes you need full blown applications. One task of these applications is to make sure that the administrator has in first place the right to administer the attribute itself, later to make a precise audit and later to answer the question "who has in the organization this specific right". Of course, these application are distributed and accessed by Browser. Who makes them? Novell, SUN Microsystem, IBM, Oracle, SAP just to name a few. I asked myself why the simple administration tool is scarcely represented. My answer is that there is no market for that. - We're also trying to have a printable report of everyone in the directory, sort of like a hard-copy phone list. Does anyone have a suggestion on how that can be accomplished? I saw once a nice ODBC driver for LDAP. Or you can get a look to the products of Calendra, a company specializing producing reports from directories. - Lastly, there doesn't seem to be a standard as to which attribute stores which data. Should I be using portalAddress for the full address, or separate it out and list the street, city, and st separately? LDAP is by far more standardized that SQL. You may give a deep look to the literature available to decide how to store your data. Sure, you are given some freedom. There is also some subtle difference between different LDAP servers, like in the Sun One Directory server; the telephoneNumber attribute is multi-valued, whereas in the Microsoft ADAM server, it only accept a single value. The difference are much more than subtle. I wamly suggest you to make a trial between OpenLDAP, SUN offering and MS ADAM. Then you can decide. Best regards Giovanni --- You are currently subscribed to [email protected] as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE as the SUBJECT of the message.
