There has been some interesting discussion over the past couple of days about Domino Directory Independence. Domino “directory independence” would allow information now stored in the Domino person documents to be stored in another directory such as third party LDAP or Active Directory. I had quickly responded to the discussion with the recent presentations that Gabriella Davis and Tom Duff and myself had made at IAMLUG that were somewhat directory related – including a session that described how to use another directory for authentication without requiring the HTTP password in the Domino Directory, and the use of Tivoli Directory Integrator to update data in either the Domino Directory or an LDAP directory.
But I’ve been doing some further thinking about this. Why would you want to store person data in Active Directory? What exactly is in the Person document? Have you looked under its hood? Are there attributes available in Active Directory that would match one for one those that are currently used in the Person document? Well the answer is no. Having done a fair bit of TDI connectivity between Domino and LDAP, I’ve come to realize that you either have to task existing attributes for Domino that aren’t being used by Active Directory, or you need to add them. Do you know how to add them? Do you have an LDAP or Active Directory expert in your environment? Is Active Directory stable? What if you don’t want to depend on Active Directory? What if you want to move to the cloud?
Okay, so what if all those attributes were available? Then yes, using LDAP or Active Directory as your primary directory might make more sense. As the linkages for desktop policies and mail routing and ACL’s, etc., etc., would be easier to recreate. But again, stop and think about it a moment. They don’t currently exist, so building them is a huge project. Do we as customers really get the most out of something like Directory Independence versus being able to use Active Directory or LDAP for authentication for Domino, or being able to customize the Domino Directory easily and quickly, when precious IBM development resources can be used to fix existing problems or coming up with an entirely new solution?
