Northwestern’s current online directory system, known as Ph, will be phased out Dec. 1 and replaced with a more technologically advanced system known as LDAP — Lightweight Directory Access Protocol.
Information stored in the directory will be more manageable and current than Ph, said Wendy Woodward, director of Technology Support Services for NU Information Technology. More information also will be displayed, such as the user’s given and official names.
“There’s definitely the ability to display more information, even though some of it is merely redundant,” Woodward said.
Those who use Ph to look up phone numbers and e-mail addresses likely will see few changes, other than having to reconfigure their e-mail clients’ search functions to point toward LDAP instead, Woodward said.
She said LDAP, an “industry standard” recognized by most computer programmers, would be more streamlined and compatible with new applications than Ph, which was created at NU in the early 1990s.
LDAP was created at University of Michigan. It can be used to keep track of and store information about “entities,” whether those are printers linked through a network or entries for people.
Under LDAP students can more easily control what personal information is displayed, Woodward said. The online directory also will be more secure: Professors and researchers’ computer programs sometimes fill their lists using Ph, but after the switch, the LDAP database will be populated by information fed from CAESAR.
“There may be some applications that we don’t even know about that are happily pulling down this information,” Woodward said. “We just want to make sure that we talk to the right data owners and that the systems are set up in a secure manner.”
Though the time needed to upgrade from Ph to LDAP will vary for different applications, Woodward said the NUIT center will experience no downtime when it makes the switch.
“Once they’ve tested it in a test environment they’ll upload it and it’ll be seamless,” she sid. “No one will see anything.”
McCormick freshman Eric Schickli said the Ph directory sometimes disappoints him due to its spartan nature, but he does not know whether LDAP will be any more helpful.
“Sometimes when I Ph something there are a lot of blank spaces and not a lot of information on the system, but I don’t know anything about LDAP,” he said.
Associated Student Government Technology Director Adam Forsyth said he also would like to see some improvements in the online directory system, such as a more powerful look-up function that can locate students by dorm, floor or Greek organization. Still, he said he supports the change.
“It’s moving forward technologically, and that’s what the university needs to do,” he said.
Reach Tina Peng at [email protected].
