> developer > dnu > courses > beginning eDirectory page 15

eDirectory for the Beginner

February 2002

DeveloperNet University Course

Reader Rating    from ratings

Easily Manage Your Directory

eDirectory is the industry's most easily managed directory.

Easy Object Management

With eDirectory 8.5 you can easily and quickly accommodate changes to the organization and to personnel assignments without having to delete and recreate objects from scratch. This leaves you with time to attend to network improvement--time that is usually taken up by repetitive housekeeping tasks.

Example.  When Eva is transferred from Accounting to Human Resources, you can move her object from one organizational unit (OU) to another in one quick, drag-and-drop operation. No need to delete her object from one OU and recreate it in another, and no worry that her information will become lost in the transfer--her e-mail account and password will remain intact and she will still be able to access her personal network folder. Her object will also automatically acquire all the rights assigned to the new OU: whereas in the Accounting OU she had rights to the Funds database, upon moving her object to the Human Resources OU she will immediately acquire rights to the Employees database.

Figure 6: The system administrator can grant Eva all the default rights of her new OU in one drag-and-drop operation.

Dynamic Inheritance

With eDirectory 8.5, organizations can choose to centralize management and administration services across departmental boundaries or to delegate administration to the department or workgroup level. For example, one department may have more strict security requirements than the rest, so rights can be given to one user who would have exclusive administrative control over that department's directory branch. Once those rights were granted at the highest level of the department's directory, the rights would automatically "flow down" to the subordinate objects. This feature eliminates the need to add redundant information to the access control list (ACL) of each object in that container, which saves valuable disk space and bandwidth.

Example.  Figure 7 shows Ilsa given administrative control over the entire New York OU: once her user icon has been dragged and dropped to the New York OU level, her rights extend downward to include the Albany and NYC OUs and all the servers and users in them.

Figure 7: Administrative rights granted at the OU level automatically "flow down" to all subordinate objects.

Flexible Scope of Administration

The scope of administration in eDirectory 8.5 can be as broad as an entire enterprise or as specific as an object's individual attributes. You can grant administrative rights down to the user level, such as the ability for a user to manage objects--users, printers, and servers--or attributes--e-mail addresses and phone numbers.

Partitioning with Fine Degree of Granularity

Creating partitions not only provides increased fault tolerance, it also reduces traffic across unreliable or expensive WAN links, eases workload on servers, and maximizes server disk space. With eDirectory 8.5 you can partition down to a single OU, which can be any size you choose. This feature gives you the flexibility to partition according to what will best optimize network resources. And no matter how many partitions you create, the directory tree will appear as a unified whole so that you can manage it from a single point.

Flexible Directory Indexing

An indexing system in a directory is necessary to provide optimal search performance of the directory. With eDirectory 8.5 you can build an index from any object or attribute in the directory.

Figure 8: A ConsoleOne screen shot of the Index Management page.

Directory-Management Tools.  With NDS management tools you have the flexibility to design and manage a directory infrastructure that suits your organization's needs. eDirectory 8.5 includes the following tools:

NDS Server	Places replicas of eDirectory 8.5 locally on primary domain controllers and backup domain controllers (PDCs and BDCs).
ConsoleOne and NDS iMonitor	Manage all your network users and resources.
NDS Manager	Manages partitions, replicas, servers and the eDirectory 8.5 schema.
Novell Client	Provides users with access to all eDirectory 8.5 features.
LDAP	Provides an open structure for integration with applications written to the Internet standard.
Novell Import Convert Export utility (ICE)	Imports and exports large amounts of LDIF and LDAP data.
A repair utility	Repairs and corrects problems with the eDirectory 8.5 database, such as records, schema, bindery objects, and external references.
A backup utility	Backs up and restores eDirectory 8.5 objects and schema.