[NGO] ldap vs generic plone authentication

[sisi]

Hi everyone,

I have a question for all of you who have chosen to authenticate via
ldap. I was planning on using ldap to authenticate my users on our
extranet (still under development), but after a recent chat with someone
from amaze, I'm doubting the wisdom of this.

We will host our extranet on a remote server (undecided as yet where),
but we have an ldap server in our office network that we would like to
use to replace a (groan) filemaker database (which has a contacts list
of no more than 500 entries). Some but not all of this information we
will also use in the profiles of our plone users.

I wanted to tie everything in together, because there are so many
overlaps, but I realise now that having an ldap server on our plone
server, and one on our network server, is a little overkill.

Can't I just use normal plone authentication and then use a script on
the plone server to dump the information into ldap on our office network
server?

Is there anyone who has used ldap on their plone site to communicate
with an ldap server in a remote location? And why did you choose to do
this? I'm just not a database expert, ldap is giving me a headache and I
really can't remember why I made the decision I made anymore!

Thanks for any sanity going,
sisi

-- 
# sisi nutt # extranet coordinator
# Friends of the Earth International
# PO Box 19199 # 1000 GD Amsterdam # The Netherlands
# Tel 31 20 6221369  # Fax 31 20 6392181  # http://www.foei.org
# email sisi at foei.org # skype foei_sisi