TechTalks Event
Building a Directory: What Are the Essentials?
with guest experts Frank Grewe of the University of Minnesota and Steve Kunz of Iowa State University
December 13, 2001
Audio
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Thinking about starting a directory? Want to understand more about it? This was Frank's third Tech Talk on this topic with CREN and Steve's first. See links to previous ones, below. Click here to listen to a streaming audio archive of Howard and Judith interviewing our guest experts, first recorded at 4 pm Eastern time on December 13, 2001.
Guest Experts
Frank
Grewe is a Manager in the Academic
& Distributed Computing Services unit of the Office
of Information Technology with the University
of Minnesota.
Steven
L. Kunz is a Systems Analyst/Software Engineer at Iowa State
University.
Co-Hosts
Howard Strauss (above, left), Manager of Academic Applications
at Princeton University, is TechTalk's Technology Anchor.
Judith Boettcher is the Executive Director of CREN.
Together, Bob and Judith will ask the really tough questions—and relay the questions you email to them at expert@cren.net.
Background & Resources
One of the best places to prepare for educated listening to a Tech Talk event is the archive of previous, related events. On February 17, 2000, our guests for Building Directories: The Fundamentals were Ken Klingenstein and Keith Hazelton. On November 4, 1999 Frank Grewe and Mike LaHaye joined us for Getting Started with Directories. On April 22, 1999, our event was titled simply Campus Directories and our guest experts were Frank Grewe and Jeff Hodges.
Active Directory, is an essential component of the Windows 2000 architecture, presents organizations with a directory service designed for distributed computing environments. This link includes live demos and lots more. Microsoft Metadirectory Services is a centralized service that stores and integrates identity information from multiple directories in an organization.
The Open Group's Directory Interoperability Forum (DIF) "enables and promotes open and interoperable directories based on open standards." It has current working groups on Certification, LDAP-DCE Registration Intergration, Mobile and Directory, Standards Coordination, and more.
Another useful, somewhat related site is the Open LDAP organization.
Jeff Hodges, a former Tech Talk guest, maintains an extensive LDAP Roadmap & FAQ.There is a wealth of information and many hyperlinks to additional resources on Jeff's page.
The Internet2 Directories page provides a plain and simple explanation and links to additional related resources on MACE-Dir, the directories working group of the Middleware Architecture Committee for Education (MACE); DoDHE, the Directory of Directories for Higher Education; eduPerson, the EDUCAUSE/INternet2 trask force intended to define an LDAP object class that includes widely-used person attributes in higher education; andLDAP Recipe, a Recipe for Configuring and Operating LDAP Directories.
A search on "directories" in EDUCAUSE's Information Resources Library will find 8 presentation abstracts of interest.
And the Directory category in that same library contains three items:
- Middleware: Directories (PowerPoint) by Michael R. Gettes;
- On Beyond Z: Building a Directory Service (PDF and PowerPoint) by Deborah Keyek-Franssen, Marin Stanek, and Paula J. Vaughan; and
- State-of-the-Art on Deployment of Directories (PDF) by Larry D. Conrad.
