Microsoft® Windows® XP Unleashed

The Development of Lightweight Directory Access Protocol

In 1993 the X.500 protocol standards were approved by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU); later these standards were also adopted by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The purpose of the various protocols under this standard was to create a hierarchical database and the necessary protocols needed to access the database so that information from different applications such as those envisioned by the X.400 standards for e-mail could be located in a central database. Because the namespace provided by the X.500 standards was so flexible, developers realized that a directory could be created to store many different kinds of information, not just the e-mail ...