What is LDAP? And what is the significance of an LDAP Version 3-compliant directory?
LDAP stands for “Lightweight Directory Access Protocol,” the Internet standard for directory services. Based on the earlier ISO X.500 directory service standard, LDAP is designed for deployment with Internet-centric, “thin client” applications. The specification for LDAP is defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force ( IETF), the same organization responsible for other well-known Internet standards such as HTTP and TCP/IP. LDAP Version 3 refers to the latest version of the LDAP specification, which was approved as a proposed Internet Standard by the IETF in December, 1997. LDAP Version 3 improves on LDAP Version 2 in a number of important areas: Internationalization – LDAP Version 3 implements encoding of the Unicode character set, allowing servers and clients to support characters used in every language in the world.
