Action on All Fronts

LDAP version 3 and Microsoft's Active Directory will help NDS tie people and networks together.

Mike Hurwicz

It's going to be an exciting year for enterprise directories, which provide a unified, network-wide store for data about network resources. These special-purpose databases make managers' and users' lives easier by providing a single, hierarchical interface to data about user accounts, servers, volumes, print queues, e-mail accounts, digital certificates, component object names, and any other information that human beings or applications may require in orde r to access or manage network resources. The three major players in this arena today are Netscape, Novell, and Microsoft.

The big news will be the release of Microsoft's Active Directory, the company's first attempt at extensible, scalable, enterprise-level directory services. Some beta copies were released in 1997, but final shipment is due later in the year with NT Server 5.0. Given the complexities of impleme nting enterprise directory services, organizations committed to networking NT should start experimenting with Active Directory as soon as possible.

Novell-oriented shops will also have their hands full, checking out Novell Directory Services (NDS) for NT (scheduled for release soon) and versions from IBM (for the RS/6000 running AIX, and for S/390 mainframes), as well as from Unix vendors, including Sun, the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO), HP, and Unisys.

For many, this will also be the year to start serious testing of the Lightweight Directory Access P rotocol (LDAP). LDAP is firmly ensconced as the multivendor directory protocol. Active Directory will support it, and, by the middle of 1998, so will all versions of NDS. The third major directory contender, Netscape, has always supported LDAP.

For now, LDAP defines only an access protocol, a way for clients to query servers. However, vendors such as Netscape and Novell are working on server-to-server replication based on LDAP. You'll see single-vendor replication based on LDAP in 1998. You'll probably be able to do some testing of multivendor LDAP-based replication, too, but it will most likely be 1999 before you'll be able to consider deployment in production environments.

If you need to continue to support directories from multiple vendors, you should also start educating yourself about meta-directories, such as Zoomit's Via. A metadirectory is specifically designed to provide centralized access and management for multiple dissimilar directories.

Because ke y components such as Active Directory, metadirectories, and LDAP-based replication are just emerging, most organizations will still be in experimental mode with enterprise directories in 1998. Those who build production systems must either rely on tried-and-true products like NDS or else be prepared to live on the bleeding edge. However, since enterprise directories affect everyone in the company, are typically costly to implement, and raise complex problems of integration, synchronization, interoperability, privacy, and data cleansing, a protracted period of testing and preparation is necessary.

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Where to Find

Novell

Provo, UT
Phone:    801-861-7000
Internet: 
http://www.novell.com




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What's New in LDAP 3

What's New in LDAP 3
Feature	Benefit
Intelligent referrals: Servers can refer a query to other servers.	Users can perform Internet-wide address book lookups. Users enjoy the illusion of a single directory even if directory data is scattered across multiple servers.
Support for international character sets such as UTF-8 encoding and language attribute tags.	Customers can deploy directories using their native language. Applications can display multiple languages in the same window.
Enhanced security such as LDAP over Secure Sockets Layer and Simple Authentication and Security Layer (SASL) framework.	Strong authentication and encryption protects directory data. Extensible SASL security framework allows use of existing security systems such as Kerberos.
Dynamically extensible schema: Schema can be published in the directory and managed through LDAP operations.	Applications can easily write private data to the directory, making the directory a perfect place to put user preferences, configuration data, and other shared data.

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Novell in 1998

illustration_link (15 Kbytes)

AT A GLANCE: Common directories for looking up any network account or resource will proliferate in 1998, along with replication between different directories and unified ways to manage dissimilar directories.

WHO SUPPORTS IT: Novell, Microsoft, Netscape, Zoomit, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Unisys, Santa Cruz Operation, Sun