A public electronic distributed directory service could soon become a realistic option for electronic mail users, following the decision by 13 North American message carriers to pilot the X500 standard. The 13 include BT North America Inc, AT&T Co, GE Information Services and MCI Communications Corp and all are members of the North American Directory Forum which was set up last year to investigate the possibility of an X500-based public electronic directory. Co-chairman of the Forum Ted Myers says the initial phase of the trial will involve the carriers testing their various directory services for connectivity and interoperability and will also involve testing X500 interoperability between private electronic mail groups and the public carriers. At the moment users of one electronic mail system cannot look up the address by the person’s name of users on a different vendor’s system. Myers says that the length of the trial and the results will depend on what the companies learn but at it should at least result in users of different public electronic mail operators being able to look up the addresses of users on any operator’s system. In the long term, X500-based directories could lead to an integration of telephony and electronic mail services, with users being able to access, for example operator help services from telecom operators via their terminals. Apart from interconnection issues between carriers, the Forum will also examine the X500 standard itself, and will look critically at some of the features set up within it by the international telephony body CCITT. Functions that will be examined include the direct look-up of specific entries – X500 Read operation – as well as the ability to search based on specified criteria. The Forum has been operating in liaison with the European Telecommunications Standards Institute with the ultimate goal of a fully compatible, global directory system. Procedures have been put in place to set up an exchange of information between the two groups. Forum members include Bell Atlantic Corp, Bell Communications Research representing US West, IBM, Infonet, Pacific Bell, Performance Systems International, Southwestern Bell Corp and Sprint International.
