Google Apps gains LDAP support

30.04.2009
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 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 organizations, 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 customization settings, tests and simulations originally developed and refined for the Postini directory sync tool," wrote Navneet Goel, Google enterprise product manager, in a Thursday.