PROVO, Utah — May 29, 2002 — Novell, Inc., the leading provider of Net business solutions, today announced a submission to a leading standards body that will promote and formalize the role of directories in Web services deployments. Presented to the Internet Engineering Task Force, the submission is a specification authored by two Novell engineers that outlines how to represent Universal Description Discovery & Integration (UDDI) data in an LDAP directory. LDAP directories, and Novell® eDirectory™ in particular, are the ideal repository for UDDI data because they offer scalable, fast and secure access to information, features that are integral to the deployment of Web services.

A fundamental building block of a Web services infrastructure is a services registry built on the UDDI standard. A UDDI registry provides the vehicle for organizing and managing Web services, so that service consumers can find and access the services they need, and service providers can publish the services they offer. In order to give these UDDI registries the kind of speed, security and scalability demanded by a Web services environment, they must be built on directory services. Novell's submission to the IETF offers a standard approach for placing UDDI information into an LDAP directory.

"Directories are going to drive the adoption of UDDI," said Winston Bumpus, Novell's director of standards. "If you look at the function of a UDDI registry, companies are going to write to it a few times and then read it a lot - which is exactly what directories are optimized to do. In addition, directories inherently support authentication mechanisms, adding security to the registry, and are extremely fast and scalable.

"More specifically, Novell eDirectory is the best directory service for UDDI," Bumpus said. "Its massive market adoption, with more than 420 million licenses worldwide, and scalability beyond one billion objects make eDirectory the logical choice to handle the requirements of a UDDI registry."

Novell's submission, titled "LDAP Schema for UDDI," was authored by Novell engineers Kent Boogert and Bruce Bergeson. Originally submitted in February, the specification has been refined and updated and will be resubmitted to the IETF this week. The specification defines the schema for representing UDDI data types in an LDAPv3 directory. It defines schema elements to represent a businessEntity, a businessService, a bindingTemplate, a tModel and a publisherAssertion. To see the specification, go to http://search.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-bergeson-uddi-ldap-schema-00.txt.

Press contacts:
Shawn Dickerson
Novell, Inc.
Phone: (801) 861-2932
E-mail: sdickerson@novell.com