Novell eDirectory - Full Service Directory

What is the Full Service Directory?

A full service directory empowers you to manage and control your network and the unrelenting pace of change forced upon you by the software and hardware vendors. It enables you to easily resolve staffing and budget concerns and quickly respond to the end user demands and problems.. The bottom line is that Novell eDirectory is the full service directory that simplifies, automates and protects information, while taking full advantage of emerging information and technologies.

The competition, Microsoft's Active Directory and Netscape's Directory Server have offered definitions that only match their respective product's abilities. A minimal directory service as defined by Microsoft and Netscape is part of a distributed computing environment that provides a way to locate and identify the users and resources available on the network. It should provide basic lookup like a phone directory. Given a name for a person or resource, it provides the information necessary to access that person or resource.

Novell offers an in-depth view of how a directory should be used by defining the full service directory. By definition, the full service directory is a general-purpose database that manages discovery, security, storage, and relationships.

Discovery

Discovery enables you to browse, search, and retrieve specific information from the directory. For example, you can search for specific object types, such as, users, printers, and application objects, or search their specific properties such as users name, phone number, address, network number and so on. Discovery must support the industry standard access methods, for example, the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) protocol.

Security

Security controls access to the all the information that is stored in the directory. This means that you can establish rules and grant rights to the users for the information in the directory. In addition, you can control the flow of information within your company, across networks of partners, and even your customers. Using the full service directory, you can manage the electronic transactions between companies through the cryptographic and key management systems. More specifically, the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) available in Novell eDirectory today provides security for Internet data integrity and privacy across public networks. It includes both public-key cryptography and digital certificates for checking the authenticity of keys used in a public session.

Storage

Storage is the database structure for the directory. It gives you the basic ability to save information in the database for future reference. The database is indexed, cached, and guarded from data corruption by a transaction system. Besides merely storing data, the database allows you to automatically control the type of data by applying classifications to the data structures. The classifications are flexible and extensible to provide future representations in the database. The database can be split into physical pieces and distributed or placed on multiple servers. These features enable you keep a portion of the data close to the users and resource that need them and make multiple copies of the data for redundancy.

Relationship

Relationship is the ability to build associates between the people, network devices, network applications, and information on the network. For example, instead of storing the user's profile information on the local machine, it can be stored in Novell eDirectory. The result is that the profile information becomes global within the scope of the directory and the user can access the profile information from anywhere. This means that the user receives the same profile regardless of where he attaches and logs in to the network. In addition, the access to the profile information is tightly controlled. The only user that can gain access is the one with the proper credentials. Thus, the integrity of profile information is protected and secure, and the user can access it globally-easily.

Summary

A full service directory empowers you to manage the unrelenting pace of change forced upon you by the software and hardware vendors. It enables you to easily administer and respond to the end user demands and problems. The bottom line is that Novell eDirectory is the full service directory that simplifies, automates and protects information and information technology.