On Fri, 2005-07-29 at 07:01, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
please excuse my extreme lack of specific knowledge on this subject, yet what are large companies using that are not using on the M$ server side?
Excluding Novell eDirectory (fka NDS) from considerations, _every_ Fortune 100 company I've been at either uses a NsDS based tree (including Sun One) for their enterprise, and syncs ADS to/from it, or segments with another LDAP solution (e.g., Netegrity, many others). The NsDS or other LDAP solution almost _always_ pre-dates ADS adoption, simply because it was necessary to manage countless numbers of users and systems.
Back up a step and I think you'd find that those companies had mainframe X.500 systems that predate any PC or unix implementations because at the time only a mainframe had the necessary capacity. Some may still be running the master copy on mainframes. Remember that the L in LDAP means 'lightweight' which only makes sense in comparison to X.500, and that from the start LDAP was designed to work as a tcp front end query mechanism to X.500 directories as well as a standalone database for smaller systems.