What is LDAP used for?

Question

I know that LDAP is used to provide some information and to help facilitate authorization.

But what are the other usages of LDAP?

Answer 1

LDAP is just a protocol to access structured information. LDAP has standardized local and remote access to information whereas in case of database there is only standardized local access and remote access is proprietary.

LDAP server is optimized for search operation and database for transactions(Insert/Delete).

For more information refer following link:

http://www.itszero.in/2013/09/what-is-ldap-ad-adam.html

Answer 2

• LDAP main usage is to provider faster retrieval of data . It acts as a central repository for storing user details that can be accessed by various application at same time .

• The data that is read various time but we rarely update the data then LDAP is better option as it is faster to read in it because of its structure but updating(add/updatee or delete) is bit tedious job in case of LDAP

• Security provided by LDAP : LDAP can work with SSL & TLS and thus can be used for sensitive information .

• LDAP also can work with number of database providing greater flexibility to choose database best suited for our environment

• Can be a better option for synchronising information between master and its replicase
• LDAP apart from supporting the data recovery capability .Also , allows us to export data into LDIF file that can be read by various software available in the market

Answer 3

Light weight directory access protocal is used to authenticate users to access AD information

Answer 4

The main idea of LDAP is to keep in one place all the information of a user (contact details, login, password, permissions), so that it is easier to maintain by network administrators. For example you can:

• use the same login/passwd to login on an Intranet and on your local computer.
• give specific permissions to a group of user. For example some could access some specific page of your Intranet, or some specific directories on a shared drive.
• get all the contact details of the people in a company on Outlook for example.

Answer 5

To take the definitions the other mentioned earlier a bit further, how about this perspective...

LDAP is Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. DAP, is an X.500 notion, and in X.500 is VERY heavy weight! (It sort of requires a full 7 layer ISO network stack, which basically only IBM's SNA protocol ever realistically implemented).

There are many other approaches to DAP. Novell has one called NDAP (NCP Novell Core Protocols are the transport, and NDAP is how it reads the directory).

LDAP is just a very lightweight DAP, as the name suggests.

Answer 6

That's a rather large question.

LDAP is a protocol for accessing a directory. A directory contains objects; generally those related to users, groups, computers, printers and so on; company structure information (although frankly you can extend it and store anything in there).

LDAP gives you query methods to add, update and remove objects within a directory (and a bunch more, but those are the central ones).

What LDAP does not do is provide a database; a database provides LDAP access to itself, not the other way around. It is much more than signup.