Google Apps gains LDAP support

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New directory tool announced

By Juan Carlos Perez | Miami | Monday, 11 May, 2009

Google Apps has gained a directory tool designed to simplify and accelerate the setup of this hosted collaboration and communication suite.

With the new Directory Sync, Apps can tap into existing Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)-based user directories, such as the ones in IBM's Lotus Domino and Microsoft's Active Directory, so that administrators don't have to set up a separate directory in the Google suite.

This functionality will likely appeal in particular to a segment of the collaboration market that Google is very interested in attracting: enterprise IT departments.

Google Apps has mostly been adopted in small and medium-size companies, and groups within large organisations, although the suite has nabbed large deployments in universities and government settings.

The new tool, which comes from technology Google acquired when it bought Postini, runs behind customers' firewalls and offers a one-way delivery of directory information to Google Apps.

"The utility offers many of the customisation settings, tests and simulations originally developed and refined for the Postini directory sync tool," wrote Navneet Goel, Google enterprise product manager, in a blog posting.

The LDAP component is available at no additional cost for administrators of the Premier, Education and Partner versions of Apps.

It will be available as a software download that can be loaded onto an on-premise server, says Rajen Sheth, Google Apps senior product manager.

Until now, administrators have had several ways of loading user-directory data into Apps, including a user-provisioning application programming interface (API), a web-based interface for manual data entry and a bulk-uploading capability, Sheth says.

However, the new tool is tightly integrated into Apps and offers more directory management features than the other options, he says.