IN THIS CHAPTER
Querying Public LDAP Servers 687
Interacting with Directories 688
One of the ongoing organizational tasks of any corporation is the structuring and maintenance of user and company information. This alone is a daunting process, and despite all the recent advances in collaboration technology, there still does not exist one single, standardized method that all corporations use to store this information.
For example, company A acquires company B and needs to combine information for users, departments, and other organizational entities. If each company is using a different method to store directory information, you can easily see the problem this creates. This type of disparity in corporate directory data was one of the underlying reasons, among others, for the creation of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).