PDF Estimated Time To Read This: 2 – 3 minutes
In this post, I am going to cover the new Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) features that were added to PD Place™ version 3.7.1. This is especially of interest to PD Place users who are considering integrating their installation with LDAP servers such as the Microsoft® Active Directory® service (or have already done so).
The LDAP Preference Area
There’s a new area in PD Place’s “Preferences” screen, dedicated to LDAP-related preferences, which were originally found in the “General” screen. By separating this preference into its own area, the administrative user can, at a glance, view and manage the integration between PD Place and their LDAP server.
The “LDAP School Record Level” Preference
This preference is brand new and was added to enhance the search for location information, for the user currently logged into the system.
Previously, if a user who had a record in the LDAP server logged into PD Place, then PD Place could fetch the locations associated with that user from that LDAP record. Previously these locations could only be fetched from the same user’s LDAP record. This proved to be inconvenient, as many times in a typical LDAP setup, the location information would be contained in a parent record for the user, not in the user record itself.
The “LDAP School Record Level” preference solves this problem by letting PD Place look somewhere else for the user’s associated location information from LDAP. Specifically, it tells the system to look for the location in a record that is an ancestor of the user’s LDAP version.
For example, if a location is represented by an LDAP record, and the users who belong to that location are stored in records that are directly underneath it, then the administrative user can set the “LDAP School Record Level” preference to “1”, and PD Place will search the user record’s parent file for location-related information.
This new preference is an improvement in that it allows for a wider set of options when it comes to synchronizing a user’s site associations between an LDAP server and PD Place.
Stay Tuned!
In future blog posts, I’ll describe the various other new LDAP-related preferences that were introduced in PD Place version 3.7.1.
You can always contact the PD Place support team for further information about the software’s LDAP integration features, or any other feature, by calling 519.641.7727 or 1.800.650.8882, or emailing PDPlace_Support@coresolutions.ca.
