Friday, September 1, 2006

Inventions on Extending LDAP functionality- A TRIZ based Analysis

Author: Umakant Mishra
Abstract:
The LDAP server stores the directory information in a database. The client makes a TCP/IP connection and sends requests to an LDAP server. The LDAP server executes the client requests and returns a response to the client. LDAP offers nine basic functional operations, viz., add, delete, modify, bind, unbind, search, compare, and modify distinguished name and abandon.
           
Apart from the above basic operations, LDAP v3 includes new mechanism called Extended Operations, which allows additional operations to be defined for services not available in this protocol, for instance digitally signed operations and results. Using this feature it is possible to provide new operations and extend the functionality of existing operations.
           
The extended operation allows clients to make requests and receive responses with predefined syntaxes and semantics. These may be defined in RFCs or be private to particular implementations. Each request must have a unique object identifier assigned to it (RFC 2251, www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2251.txt). The server will respond to this with a message called ExtendedResponse. If the server does not recognize the request name, it will return an error.
           
This article analyzes patents on Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) Extended Functionality. The objective of this article is to find out what are the major concerns in LDAP Extended functionality, what inventions have already been made and which areas are lying unexplored.
           
Keywords: LDAP directory, Directory Protocol, Inventions, Software Inventions, LDAP inventions, Software Patents, LDAP data access, LDAP data storage,  Data Protection, LDAP usage, LDAP functionality

Umakant Mishra, Inventions on Extending LDAP functionality- A TRIZ based Analysis, TRIZsite Journal, Sept 2006

Umakant Mishra, Inventions on Extending LDAP Functionality - A TRIZ Based Analysis (August 2006). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=925941 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.925941

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