Planning LDAP accounts on Notes® clients

HCL Notes® clients can use LDAP accounts set up in Contacts to connect directly to a remote LDAP directory server. Using an LDAP account, a Notes® user can browse the remote LDAP directory and can search for addresses in the remote LDAP directory when sending mail.

About this task

Some of the issues to consider before setting up LDAP accounts on Notes® clients are:

  • Would you rather set up directory assistance on Notes® clients' mail servers or directory servers to provide Notes® users with access to a remote LDAP directory rather than use LDAP accounts? You might use directory assistance to avoid having to update client LDAP accounts if the remote LDAP directory configuration changes; if you use directory assistance, you change only the Directory Assistance document for the remote LDAP directory if the directory server configuration changes.
  • What settings do you want to use in an LDAP account? For example, if an LDAP directory server requires a search base, you should specify a search base in the account. Should you use a simple search filter that searches only for a cn attribute to locate user entries, or a more complex search filter that also searches for a mail, uid, sn, or givenname attribute? If searches of the cn attribute only are adequate for your needs, using the simple search filter improves the speed of searches.
  • Should you use Desktop policy settings documents to set up and modify the LDAP accounts? This approach automates the process of creating and updating the accounts.

LDAP accounts for the Bigfoot and VeriSign directories are set up by default.