Enterprise Application Integration With XML and Java™

8.2. Directory Services

There are tens of thousands of electronic resources in most companies. These include workstations, servers, printers, network services, phones, digital certificates, documents, databases, and the list goes on ad infinitum. During the course of automating the tracking and management of these resources, the concept of a directory service was born.

Directory services are distributed, federated lists of pointers to other sources of information. The type of information one might find in a directory is metadata about other information sources within the organization. For example, a directory usually has information about people, such as their phone numbers and building locations. Other metadata that might be found in a directory ...