directory Extranet (Siemens) (DirX)

Directory servers are essential components in today's networked e-business landscape, where they form the basis for identity and access management both for the enterprise internally and beyond corporate boundaries. For the intranet, the Directory Service provides a global data store for shared information about employees, organizations, as well as resources such as applications, network components, and other distributed services, where a Directory Server must hold data from hundreds of thousands of users.

Inextranet environments, the directory server manages information about customers, partners and suppliers, with data from several million users to manage. For both of these deployment environments, the directory server must manage information about user identities, control access to that information, and provide fast, highly available, and authenticated access to the information for potentially very large numbers of users.

DirX can serve as an identity data store for information about employees, customers, business partners, subscribers to services, and other participants in e-business processes. Likewise, DirX can also serve as the data store for a meta-directory, the central access interface to information from various heterogeneous directories used in an enterprise for user management and provisioning.