DIRECTORY SERVICES

Planning directory services for Notes clients
There are a variety of directory services features available to IBM® Lotus® Notes® clients. If there are Notes clients client settings that apply to groups of Notes users, use policies with Setup or Desktop settings documents to set up the desired settings on Notes clients automatically.

Contacts

Contacts is a directory on the Notes client that stores contacts created by users -- documents containing information about people with whom the users come in contact and/or send mail -- and that stores mailing lists created by users for sending mail to groups of people. Contacts also stores a variety of documents related to configuration of the Notes client.

For more information, see Lotus Notes Help.

Condensed Directory Catalog

A condensed Directory Catalog, sometimes referred to as a Mobile Directory Catalog when used on a Notes client, is an optional directory that aggregates user and group entries from one or more IBM® Lotus® Domino™ Directories. A condensed Directory Catalog provides Notes users with a small, local, organization-wide directory that they can use either off-line or when connected to the local area network.

Type-ahead addressing

Using type-ahead addressing a Notes user enters a few letters in a mail addressing field and Notes tries too match those letters to a name in a directory. If Notes finds a match, it enters the completed name in the addressing field automatically. If a Notes user has a local condensed Directory Catalog configured, type-ahead addressing does not search a directory on a server. However pressing F9 to resolve a name will search for the name in both local and server directories.

Administrators can use a setting in a Configuration Settings document to disable type-ahead addressing on a server to reduce network traffic and improve server performance.

For more information on disabling type-ahead addressing on a server, see the chapter "Customizing the Domino Mail System."

Easy location of user and group entries

Notes users can use an addressing tool or a generic search tool to find easily user and group entries in a directory. When searching Contacts or a Domino Directory, these tools provide a type-ahead-style mechanism to match letters entered by a user to a name in a directory. Users can choose to view entries in a directory by name, by Notes name hierarchy, by corporate hierarchy, and by alternate names (if used).

To search all local Contacts or an LDAP directory accessed using an LDAP Account document, users can use an LDAP-style search query to locate entries. For example, users can search for all entries with the last name "Brown."

For additional information, see Lotus Notes Help.

Access to server directories

The Notes client has automatic access to the Domino Directory in its domain. If an administrator sets up directory assistance for a secondary directory, or sets up a server-based directory catalog, Notes clients can easily address mail to users and groups in those directories.

In addition, a Notes client can set up LDAP accounts to connect directly to a remote LDAP directory.

Directory servers

Using the "Domino directory server" field on the Servers tab of a Location document in Contacts, Notes clients can use directory servers, rather than mail servers, for directory lookups.

See also