RE: Integrated Directory Service.

[Jorge Gomes Silva <jgs plurimarketing pt>]

On Monday, August 02, 1999 8:58 PM, Bruce Stephens 
[SMTP:bruce@cenderis.demon.co.uk] wrote:
> Jorge Gomes Silva <jgs@plurimarketing.pt> writes:
>
> > Are there any plans for integrating a directory service into Gnome ?
> >
> > I think that is a "must" if Gnome wants to find a place in the
> > enterprise.  It also might be useful for the home user if you think
> > about it at an Internet scale.
>
> What would Gnome use a directory for?
Well in Windows you can do things like sharing directories to allow other 
ppl to access information in your machine. If you do that you'll probably 
want to specify which users in the network will have access to your 
shares/information. You'll need a directory service for that.

I worked with some big companies and one of the things most of them 
demanded was "Roaming/Network user profiles". With Network profiles (which 
Windows provides), a user can logon at any computer, validates himself with 
a directory service on the network (a.k.a Domain Controller in Windows) , 
and gets its profile from the directory service. In that way a user's 
desktop always looks the same, independently of the computer where the user 
logged on. This kind of feature is very useful in bank branches where the 
user can logon in different computers at different times.

These are two examples of using a directory service for "desktop 
functions". Other uses may occur, like storing mail addresses (important in 
big organizations), etc.

As an additional point, one of the most important features that Microsoft 
has been advertising for its Windows 2000 is the "Active directory" (I know 
Microsoft may not be a good example...).

>
> It's clearly the wrong thing to provide one.
>
> I can see why you might want a directory to be around, and so you'd
> want Linux/FreeBSD/etc., to have a directory, but I don't want a GUI
> to provide one.
>
> It would be nice to have a good Gnome directory user agent (using
> LDAP, presumably), but that's an application.  I can also see why
> you'd want mail user agents (and anything else which wanted email
> addresses) to be able to use LDAP.
>
> I'm less sure that configuration and/or address books should be done
> using LDAP.  I'm sure they will be, but I'm dubious that this is the
> right thing to use.  (An SQL database for address book might be an
> interesting way to go.)
>
>
> --
>         FAQ: Frequently-Asked Questions at http://www.gnome.org/gnomefaq
>          To unsubscribe: mail gnome-list-request@gnome.org with
>                        "unsubscribe" as the Subject.