The name of an Page 5 entry must be unique on the same level in the subtree of the DIT to which the entry belongs. The flexibility of the service. Besides for public purposes, X.500 may also be used for specific private Directory Service applications. Nevertheless one local infrastructure can be used for both the public and private computers. Page 6 - Good alternative for paper Directories.
Maintenance can take place in a distributed way.
In order to do a search an attribute type together with a value have to be specified. Then the Directory searches for all entries that contain an attribute of that type with the given value. For example one can search for all persons in an organisation having a particular common name, or all organisations within a country that have telecommunications as their business category. It is up to the organisations that maintain the DSA's to decide who may perform which searches and also how many levels deep a search may be. Searches can be done on the basis of an exact or approximate match.