Linux.com

LDAP in the enterprise is old news. Most every enterprise already has LDAP in the form of Novell's eDirectory or Microsoft's Active Directory. What they lack is applications that integrate with LDAP. While it's great that most email clients have the typically unused ability to search LDAP as an address book, most other applications want to implement their own directory rather than use an existing LDAP directory. This is a most annoying problem for most people. Administrators suffer with it because they must manage multiple directories and sets of rights. Users suffer from it because the are forced to remember multiple logins.

Database applications are the most notorious for their insistence on creating their own user directory and rights rather than integrating into the enterprise directory and centralizing management. Hell, MySQL isn't even capable of doing this. PostgreSQL is capable but, most developers don't bother. That's one of the really nice features of MS SQL, it easily and seamlessly integrates into Microsoft's Active Directory.

We're all set for directories. We need application developers to start using them rather than arbitrarily deciding that their way is better.

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