LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol)

Introduction to LDAP

The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is a protocol (glossary: protocol) used to access directory information. The Electronic Directory (ED) (http://www.illinois.edu/ricker/PH) is the campus's legacy directory service, providing access to campus personnel information such as names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. LDAP is being used because most new and future applications can make use of LDAP, whereas they cannot use the existing ED system. LDAP was selected based on consultation with the campus user community and an extensive review of campus needs and technological trends.

Will LDAP Replace ED? LDAP is being used alongside ED, and there are no plans to retire the ED system in the near future. However, all future system and service resources will be devoted to further developing LDAP instead of ED.

LDAP currently relies on ED for its directory information. LDAP gathers select data from ED on a nightly basis. Thus users still need to use the Electronic Directory Editor (EDE) (http://ede.cites.uiuc.edu), not LDAP, to edit personal directory information.

Using LDAP with email

Most email clients can be configured to use LDAP to search for campus directory information. For details, please see Using LDAP with Your Email Client.

Technical details

Note: Most users can rely upon the Using LDAP with your Email Client page listed above. The information below is for IT pros and database designers.

• Schema Used on the UIUC LDAP Server
• LDAP Service Support
• Practices in Directory Groups (discussion draft published by the Internet2 Middleware Initiative mace-dir-groups working group): http://middleware.internet2.edu/dir/groups/internet2-mace-dir-groups-best-practices-200210.htm