What is LDAP used for?

Question

I know that LDAP is used to provide some information and to help facilitate authorization.

But what are the other usages of LDAP?

Answer 1

To take the definitions the other mentioned earlier a bit further, how about this perspective...

LDAP is Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. DAP, is an X.500 notion, and in X.500 is VERY heavy weight! (It sort of requires a full 7 layer ISO network stack, which basically only IBM's SNA protocol ever realistically implemented).

There are many other approaches to DAP. Novell has one called NDAP (NCP Novell Core Protocols are the transport, and NDAP is how it reads the directory).

LDAP is just a very lightweight DAP, as the name suggests.