Penn State Intercom......January 18 , 2001

University updates
directory services

For years, faculty, staff and students have used the University's "Ph" online directory to look up information about others in the University community. This past Monday, the Center for Academic Computing implemented a new directory server.

Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), a client-service protocol for accessing directory information, is now online as an update to the directory server ph.psu.edu.

The system provides a more current means of providing directory information. The international technical community has created LDAP as a standardized way of distributing information, to enable new services and make it easier to add friends and colleagues at other institutions to e-mail address books.

Using database resources from the Office of Administrative Systems and from the Center for Academic Computing Tracking of User Services (CACTUS), LDAP provides easy access to such information as class lists. The system follows existing federal and state privacy laws and includes mechanisms for individuals to have their information withheld. Care has been taken to ensure that University policy is closely adhered to as well.

The transition from Ph to LDAP at Penn State involves a three-phase plan. Phase I, implemented Dec. 4, is a read-only server, which is updated from changes made via the CAC Secure Server at https://www.work.psu.edu/ and CACTUS on a daily basis.

Phase two, scheduled for March, will permit immediate updates from https://www.work.psu.edu/. This means that changes made by individuals to their directory information will be updated immediately rather than after a delay of one or more days.

The final phase of this project, to be completed by mid-summer, will use LDAP for most of the University's major services. Users will be allowed to make dynamic, live updates from native LDAP clients installed on their personal machines.

Ph queries will continue to be supported through a Ph-to-LDAP gateway. When making a request to Ph, either from a client or the University's online directory, the bridge will make the request to LDAP and return the results to the user.

For more information, including instructions for changing the configuration on individual clients to start using LDAP, check the Web at http://cac.psu.edu/ldap/.

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