LDAP Clients and Directory Services

Although the development of LDAP 3 is proceeding swiftly, few full-featured LDAP clients are available. Netscape Communicator's and Microsoft IE's email applications include a simple LDAP white-pages client (and the browser in Preview Release 3 of Netscape Communicator 4.0 can use the LDAP URL format to display more extensive directory information), but you can't use either client to fully test an LDAP service by modifying directory information.

You can, however, use SWIX, a public domain LDAP-based X.500 client created at the University of Umeå in Sweden. With SWIX, you can bind any LDAP-based directory (such as Netscape Directory Server or an NDS server running Novell's LDAP Service) and add, browse, or modify directory entries

For example, as Screen A shows, you can use SWIX to modify the attributes of an NDS user object. After binding (i.e., authenticating) to the LDAP Services for NDS using an NDS account with the appropriate rights, the user can browse the directory tree by expanding an organizational unit to display the tree's objects. After you highlight an object and select Modify from the Directory menu, SWIX shifts into an edit mode. You can change any attribute shown before clicking the Update button to write the changes to the directory. You can download SWIX 2.4 from the Windows NT Magazine's Web site at http://www.winntmag.com.