LDAP and NDS use different syntaxes. Some important differences are:
LDAP uses commas as delimiters rather than periods. For example, a distinguished, or complete, name in NDS looks like this: CN=JANEB.OU=MKTG.O=EMA. Using LDAP syntax, the same distinguished name would be CN=JANEB,OU=MKTG,O=EMA.
Some additional examples of LDAP distinguished names include:
CN=Bill Williams,OU=PR,O=Bella Notte Corp
CN=Susan Jones,OU=Humanities,O=University College London,C=GB
NDS uses both typeless (.JOHN.MARKETING.ABCCORP) and typeful (CN=JOHN.OU=MARKETING.O=ABCCORP) names. LDAP uses only typeful names with commas as the delimiters (CN=JOHN,OU=MARKETING,O=ABCCORP).
The backslash (\) is used in LDAP distinguished names as an escape character. If you use the plus (+) character or the comma (,) character, you can escape them with a single backslash character. Some examples include
CN=Pralines\+Cream,OU=Flavors,O=MFG (CN is Pralines+Cream)
CN=D. Cardinal,O=Lionel\,Turner and Kaye,C=US (O is Lionel, Turner and Kaye)
Objects can be defined with multiple naming attributes in the schema. In both LDAP and NDS, the user object has two: CN and OU. The plus symbol (+) separates the naming attributes in the distinguished name. If the attributes are not explicitly labeled, the schema determines which string goes with which attribute (the first would be CN, the second is OU for NDS and LDAP). You may reorder them in a distinguished name if you manually label each portion.
For example, here are two relative distinguished names:
Sammy (CN is Sammy)
Sammy+Lisa (CN is Sammy, the OU is Lisa)
Both relative distinguished names (Sammy and Sammy+Lisa) can exist in the same context because they must be referenced by two completely different relative distinguished names.