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Middleware

LDAP Directory Services

How it Got Started

In November, 1997, UW-Madison began looking at issues surrounding the Photo ID system that had been in use for approximately 25 years on campus. Year 2000 concerns and demands for new services prompted a study of the system, and yielded a recommendation to embark on a major system redesign.

It's worth noting a salient point brought up in this report:
"The proposed redesign for the Photo ID system brings into focus the fact that there is a directory-like component at the heart of the process."

From this point, the committee recommended that the directory-oriented portions of the Photo ID system be abstracted in redesign so that they might be made to serve a wider variety of applications and services.

This redesign was approved and essentially became the first incarnation of the UDS Registry. The back end of this system was an Oracle database that gathered information of common interest from various source systems (Human Resources, Student Information, etc) and consolidated them in a common view.

As we gained operational experience with the system, we saw the need to add some additional capabilities for the system to become of greater benefit to a wider community. These capabilities included:

  • The ability to retain conflicting information about a person as fed to us by source systems without the need to decide on the information that was "most correct".
  • The ability to add data sources without a complete system redesign
  • Hooks for running the registry as a distributed database (as might be the case at the UW System level)
  • The introduction of additional directory technologies (such as LDAP).
  • Support for security-oriented services such as identification and authentication services.

In February 2000, we presented a proposal to the DoIT Cabinet to invest in the redesign and expansion of the Registry and to invest in the construction of an LDAP-accessible directory service suitable for identity management and authentication. We identified a pilot application to make use of this infrastructure in the My UW-Madison Web Portal pilot, a pilot project consisting of approximately 500 new biology majors.