Active Directory and other LDAP services

Collaboration is at the heart of the modern Operating Systems. In the beginning of computing age operating systems were targeted at big computational centers, the groupware that existed back then was mostly base on assumption that there is always a central server and there could be some terminals connected to it.

There wasn't any reason to share information between machines because each machine was supposed to contain everything you need to do a certain job. Then came the age of personal computing, operating systems evolved and began to include various collaboration tools and services.

One of the important features of these new systems was the ability to manage security policies and share user information in the corporate network. LDAP or Lightweight Directory Access Protocol was invented to share various information within the network. LDAP is used to store user data and even organizational structures.

Active Directory is a set of services that was integrated in Windows Server operating systems and later adapted by other OSs that interconnect with those systems. Active Directory also has LDAP service which helps various programs identify users and contains all kinds of other useful directories.

Storing names, addresses, dates, structures and all sorts of other things LDAP is a base of numerous collaboration tools.

Further info:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Directory

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LDAP