Directory Synchronisation

In order to achieve a single community for mail addressing, a central Directory is required. Although specialist Directory products (such as X.500 systems) can be acquired for this purpose, it is possible to use the Exchange Directory to hold all mail addresses for the entire organisation - including OfficePower mail addresses.

Both OfficePower and Exchange support the LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) standard which allows Directory services to be accessed by many user interfaces. All OfficePower interfaces (Green-Screen, OfficePower for Windows and Web Access) can perform Directory searches using LDAP.

OfficePower also provides, as standard, a utility called uploader which can automatically synchronise the OfficePower community with an Exchange LDAP Directory.

With enhanced user attributes a feature of OfficePower/Xtra, LDAP support for Searching and Synchronising, the Directory is poised to be a key central resource in your organisation.

The benefits are:

• One central Directory for the whole organisation.
• Automatic update of the Directory when an OfficePower user is modified or deleted.
• Ability to store both X.400 and Internet addresses in a single entry. This enables OfficePower to OfficePower traffic to avoid a central gateway which may be used for Exchange interworking.
• Enhanced attributes allows for use of organisational information, such as Location/Job Title/Department etc.
• No additional software or hardware.

The uploader runs on the network master OfficePower node, which must be OfficePower/Xtra V4 or later, and can be configured to make modifications to the Exchange Directory at pre-defined intervals.

If used to populate the Directory with Internet mail addresses, the uploader will use local OfficePower Internet Alias names or can, if required, automatically generate the default Internet address to ensure that all OfficePower entries have a mail address suitable for use with an Exchange client. The types and contents of entry attributes are controlled by user template definitions allowing maximum flexibility in generating your Directory entries.

Independent of which method of mail connection (X.400 or Internet) is adopted, the contents of the Directory will enable organisation wide searches to find the appropriate entry where the actual mail address, server software and transfer mechanism being used remains transparent.