"They that give up essential liberty to obtain temporary safety,
deserve neither liberty nor safety." (Benjamin Franklin)

I don't get it... How do you get your daily exercise unless you stroll out to fetch your set of morning newspapers ? And without newspapers how do you light a fire in your wood burning stove on cold winter days ?

(...greetings from Norway... :)

Say you were given the task of live-testing bullet-proof vests from two manufacturers. One gives you full access to vest design, construction and material specs, the other tells you that you just have to trust him, the vest is safe. Which vest would you choose for the live-test ?

If you're well off, take a look at NetPoint from Oblix (http://www.oblix.com/).

It's much more than a LDAP tool, marketed more as e-biz infrastructure tool. The main feature is identity management but it also contains group management and generic management of LDAP/X.500 objects.

We're deploying it now and it will contain all our 40.000 internal users and a lot of our customers/partners. We're using iPlanet Directory servers and will use iDS as a metadirectory for all other directories (AD, NDS) that people might like to use (mgmt. decision). Hopefully LDAP will give us a single administrative point for userid/password for all our applications, including Web access, Unix logon, NT logon etc.

We see more and more systems beeing LDAP enabled, from application access down to VPN servers. We even have HP scanners where you use LDAP as the source for email addresses when scanning and mailing documents.

LDAP is here to stay !