Directory Server

The scope of the project is to develop a complete end-to-end solution including system software and applications.

The customer is a global solutions provider of Enterprise Technology Solutions (ETS), focusing businesses in Process Control Systems and Sales and Distribution Systems.

The scope of the project is to develop a complete end-to-end solution including system software and applications. The project delivered solutions to address the needs of human resources services of the corporate office of the client.

The solutions have addressed the issues including: global management of people resources and material resources across the wide spread corporate office and branch offices.

Problems

Customer was looking for an application that met specific requirements:

• A generic web based application that is scalable in terms of size of users, new features, and new requirements of users,
• Application to show Organizational hierarchy structure, personal details of the user, search feature on basis of name or email ID or employee code, various groups of employees based on the roles or positions or capacities or reporting mechanism,
• Application to provide access to the user to modify his/her details in the database
• Application to help users to see / modify a set of pre-defined details of his/her direct reports
• Application to provide a communication feature thru email to the selected people resources
• Application to provide single sign-on for all the users including employees, customers and vendors. Each user attributes to be pre-defined so that they run the select applications.

Customer was also looking for our help in performance tuning / customization of the application running on iPlanet Server.

Approach and Solution

CIBER’s approach to the problem considered multiple criteria, including Security, Speed and Scalability of the application running on the iPlanet platform.

The recommended solution included:

• iPlanet web server 4.1 for the user interfaces (inbuilt support for java and also for LDAP connectivity).
• Netscape directory server 4.0 for user directory, user authentication (having LDAP support and it could directly communicate with
• iPlanet servers through java. Fast authentication plus access security that can be defined)
• Some of the key points kept in mind while server was configured:
• The Directory Server needs to be installed on NTFS file system for security.
• The machine name and domain names should not be hard coded in the program source of the LDAP client, which connects to the directory.
• JAVA core and J2EE were used for the reasons of robustness, platform independent nature, and usable built in API’s to program LDAP clients
• The user interfaces were controlled using JSP’s and connectivity using Servlets.

Model used for designing the system was Top-Down model.

Total effort to design and deliver the system was 5 man-months.

While we delivered the solution well within the schedule, the customer was very happy with the user-friendly GUI designs.