As an enterprise develops extranet applications, it becomes increasingly difficult and expensive to manage partner, supplier, and customer data. Netscape Directory Server provides the scalability and information control required for developing extranet applications for massive numbers of users. By centralizing users, groups, and access controls across multiple applications, Netscape Directory Server dramatically simplifies administration. It also provides the foundation for strong, certificate-based authentication when used in conjunction with an X.509v3 public key certificate solution such as Netscape Certificate Management System. A number of Netscape Directory Server features allow for high availability.
Replication helps eliminate single points of failure.
Transaction logging enables failure recovery. Netscape Directory Server also minimizes downtime for administration and maintenance through online backups, configuration changes, schema updates, and indexing. Integrates with Enterprise Systems Extensive meta-directory capabilities allow easy integration with existing infrastructures. The directory provides a standard method, via LDAP, for applications to access legacy data. In this way, the data remains in its original database, but is accessed by a standard LDAP request.