University of MichiganDirectory Services

Ellen Vaughan evaughan@umich.edu

Mike La Haye mjl@umich.edu

5/12/99 csg workshop

Directory Experiences @ umich

• Where we are today

• Where we’ve been

• Where we’re headed….

5/12/99 csg workshop

Directory Experiences @ umich

• Scope of service…– Online Directory (X.500)

• White pages

• Mail delivery

– Vendor Directories• Novell NDS

• Notes

• ADS

5/12/99 csg workshop

Online Directory @ umich

• Statistics (as of April 26,1999)

– Entries 224,498• People 166,921

• Groups 56,254

• Other 1,324

5/12/99 csg workshop

Online Directory @ umich

• Sample service statistics (Monday April 26,1999)

• Search requests 957,000

• Modify requests 2,483

• Adds 188

5/12/99 csg workshop

Online Directory @ umich

• Choices made…– Schema– Source data– User@umich.edu mail routing

• killer application

• Facilitated user migration from mainframe

5/12/99 csg workshop

Source Data Issues

• Data Ownership

• Feeds from administrative sources– HR/payroll/SCDB– Paper directory issues– Common vocabulary

5/12/99 csg workshop

Data Maintenance

• Expiration

• Termination

• Affiliation duration

• Purging

5/12/99 csg workshop

Data Management

• User modification of individual entries

• User creation of groups

• Unidirectional / Bidirectional updates

5/12/99 csg workshop

Data Privacy

– Information about individuals– Information about groups

• Group Spamming

• Personal harassment

• Exposure of sensitive information

• Organizational Privacy

5/12/99 csg workshop

More Data Issues

• Naming conventions– Standards– Unambiguous data requests

• Understanding what you’re getting

• Upstream changes to source data

5/12/99 csg workshop

Unique Entity Identifier

• Short comings of hierarchical org model– Implicit organizational membership

• Managing users with multiple roles

• Managing users with changing roles

5/12/99 csg workshop

LDIF: the sneaker net for meta directories?

U n iq n am eU ser ID

In te llig en t M essag in g

B an yan S tree tTa lk

G rou p W ise

N ove ll N D S

E xch an g e

M ic roso ft w in d ows N T L otu s N otes

L D IF E xtrac t

C am p u s O n lin e D irec to ry

H u m an R esou rces S tu d en t S ervices D B

5/12/99 csg workshop

Vendor Specific Directories

• Novell NDS

• Lotus Notes

• Microsoft Windows NT

• Banyan StreetTalk

5/12/99 csg workshop

NDS

• 25,000 active users

• Primarily staff and faculty

• Single campus directory– Highly partitioned– delegated administration

• Vendor provided base schema

• Vendor provided schema extensions

5/12/99 csg workshop

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

5/12/99 csg workshop

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

5/12/99 csg workshop

Lotus Notes

• 3000 Active users today

• Looking to better integrate R5 with campus security and directory infrastructure

5/12/99 csg workshop

Building Bridges

• Stock deployments of vendor products

• Central vs. delegated administration

• Central management of accounts

• Synchronization of user attributes

• Synchronization of groups

• Can meta directories help?

5/12/99 csg workshop

Directory Experiences @ umich

Lessons learned: how to know what you’re getting…..

Avoid

Miscommunication

Wrong assumptions

Ambiguous requests