AT&T Corp, Banyan Systems Inc, IBM Corp, Lotus Development Corp, Novell Inc and more than 40 other companies have joined with Netscape Communications Corp to support the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP, RFC 1777) as a proposed open standard for directory services on the Internet. Lightweight Directory Access is a protocol for accessing on-line directory services over TCP/IP and can be used to access stand-alone Lightweight Protocol directory services or directory services supporting X.500. It provides a standard way for Internet clients, applications and Web servers to access Internet directory listings. Netscape is planning a product supporting the proposed standard, Netscape Directory Server. Based on technology pioneered at the University of Michigan, it allows corporate information such as user names, electronic mail addresses, public key certificates and contact information to be organized and published in a searchable, structured, scalable directory. This information can be replicated automatically throughout the enterprise or between enterprises, says the company. The product is expected to include the capability to create hierarchical entries, along with extensible attribute-value pairs, support for text, graphics and other data types and access control. The architecture will support up to 200,000 entries and up to 100,000 queries per hour on typical servers. Under Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, corporate directory entries are arranged in a hierarchical structure that reflects geographic and organizational boundaries. The Netscape Directory Server will ship Windows NT and major Unix systems by next quarter for around $1,000. It will also be part of future versions of Netscape SuiteSpot.
