LDAP: framework, practices, and trends

Directory services facilitate access to information organized under a variety of frameworks and applications. The lightweight directory access protocol is a promising technology that provides access to directory information using a data structure similar to that of the X.500 protocol. IBM Tivoli, Novell, Sun, Oracle, Microsoft, and many other vendors feature LDAP-based implementations. The technology's increasing popularity is due both to its flexibility and its compatibility with existing applications.