University of Michigan
Directory Services
Ellen Vaughan evaughan@umich.edu
Mike La Haye mjl@umich.edu
Directory Experiences @ umich
• Where we are today
• Where we’ve been
• Where we’re headed….
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Directory Experiences @ umich
• Scope of service…
– Online Directory (X.500)
• White pages
• Mail delivery
– Vendor Directories
• Novell NDS
• Notes
• ADS
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Online Directory @ umich
• Statistics (as of April 26,1999)
– Entries 224,498
• People 166,921
• Groups 56,254
• Other 1,324
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Online Directory @ umich
• Sample service statistics (Monday April 26,1999)
• Search requests
• Modify requests
• Adds
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957,000
2,483
188
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Online Directory @ umich
• Choices made…
– Schema
– Source data
– User@umich.edu mail routing
• killer application
• Facilitated user migration from mainframe
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Source Data Issues
• Data Ownership
• Feeds from administrative sources
– HR/payroll/SCDB
– Paper directory issues
– Common vocabulary
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Data Maintenance
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Expiration
Termination
Affiliation duration
Purging
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Data Management
• User modification of individual entries
• User creation of groups
• Unidirectional / Bidirectional updates
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Data Privacy
– Information about individuals
– Information about groups
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Group Spamming
Personal harassment
Exposure of sensitive information
Organizational Privacy
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More Data Issues
• Naming conventions
– Standards
– Unambiguous data requests
• Understanding what you’re getting
• Upstream changes to source data
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Unique Entity Identifier
• Short comings of hierarchical org model
– Implicit organizational membership
• Managing users with multiple roles
• Managing users with changing roles
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LDIF: the sneaker net for meta
directories?
Uniqname
User ID
Human Resources
Student Services DB
Campus Online Directory
LDIF Extract
Banyan StreetTalk
Novell NDS
Microsoft windows NT
Intelligent Messaging
GroupWise
Exchange
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Lotus Notes
Vendor Specific Directories
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Novell NDS
Lotus Notes
Microsoft Windows NT
Banyan StreetTalk
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NDS
• 25,000 active users
• Primarily staff and faculty
• Single campus directory
– Highly partitioned
– delegated administration
• Vendor provided base schema
• Vendor provided schema extensions
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NDS Futures
• Being adopted by the Medical Center
– 50% campus installed base of Novell products
– 15,000 GroupWise users
– Need better institutional data
• Looking at NDS v8
– more scalable
– better performance
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Windows NT
• Exchange address book
– Tools developed to import LDIF
– Looking toward Active Directory
• Active Directory
– Populating with LDIF extract today
– Modified LDIF as opposed to schema
– reasonable performance for searching
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Lotus Notes
• 3000 Active users today
• Looking to better integrate R5 with campus
security and directory infrastructure
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Building Bridges
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Stock deployments of vendor products
Central vs. delegated administration
Central management of accounts
Synchronization of user attributes
Synchronization of groups
Can meta directories help?
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Directory Experiences @ umich
Lessons learned: how to know what you’re
getting…..
Avoid
Miscommunication
Wrong assumptions
Ambiguous requests
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csg workshop