Inventions on Extending LDAP Functionality - A TRIZ Based Analysis

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, 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. 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. This article is a part of the main study made on LDAP based on 60 patents selected from US patent database.