Could someone please explain LDAP?

Question

I often hear things like \"Can we load our employee info using LDAP?\" Yet, the title \"Lightweight Directory Access Protocol\" makes me think of it as a protocol rather than a

Answer 1

LDAP is usually used as authentication database. Let's say you have CMS product you sell as Software-as-a-Service. So user gets CMS and you maintain it etc.

So, you install it to examplecustomer1.com, examplecustomer2.org, examplecustomer3.net (one software per domain). Now you have THREE user databases to maintain. So you add yourself to all systems as admin and customers accounts as well.

Then you discover LDAP. You add LDAP support to your product and now you have one central database of users. You can login as admin to all systems with your own ONE username and password. CMS system still contains user database and rights for each user but username is now used as reference to LDAP database and password field is deleted from CMS database schema.