NetIQ eDirectory

eDirectory (formerly Novell Directory Services or NDS, also marketed as NetWare Directory Services) is an X.500-compatible directory service from NetIQ, a subsidiary of OpenText. First released by Novell in 1993 with NetWare 4, it replaced the per-server bindery mechanism of earlier NetWare versions with a network-wide, hierarchical, LDAP-accessible directory. eDirectory represents organizational assets—users, groups, servers, printers, applications, and services—in a logical tree structure and supports multi-master replication, dynamic rights inheritance, and partitioning across multiple servers.

Before NetWare 4, Novell networks used the bindery, a flat-file, per-server database storing user accounts and resource access rights locally on each server. Administrators had to maintain separate accounts on every server a user needed to access, and users had to authenticate to each server individually. The bindery had no extensible schema and no inter-server relationships.

Novell designed NDS as a network-wide hierarchical replacement based in part on the X.500 directory standard developed by the ITU and ISO, while deliberately departing from strict X.500 adherence to allow future extensibility.¹ NDS shipped with NetWare 4.0 in April 1993, providing a single sign-on model in which a user authenticates once and gains access to all authorized network resources. The directory tree followed X.500 object classes, with Country, Organization, and Organizational Unit containers at its upper levels.

Novell shipped LDAP Services for NDS on December 27, 1996—announced publicly in January 1997—making it among the first comprehensive LDAP server implementations available for an enterprise directory.² LDAP Services ran on NetWare 4.1, IntranetWare, and NetWare 4.11 and was available free for download.

Versions of NDS prior to version 8 used a record-based storage engine called Recman, which depended on the Transaction Tracking System built into NetWare. In May 1999, Novell shipped NDS 8 (version 8.1x), replacing Recman with the FLAIM (FLexible Adaptable Information Manager) embeddable database engine. FLAIM removed previous object-count limits and was also adopted by the GroupWise collaboration suite from version 5. In November 1999, Novell released eDirectory 8 (version 8.3x) for NetWare, Solaris, Windows NT, and Linux, marking the product's cross-platform debut and the introduction of the eDirectory brand name.

Novell released FLAIM as open-source software under the GNU General Public License in February 2006.³

Microsoft introduced Active Directory with Windows 2000 Server, which reached manufacturing in December 1999 and went to retail in February 2000. Active Directory was also X.500-inspired and LDAP-based, competing directly with eDirectory in the enterprise directory market. By the mid-2000s, Active Directory had captured the dominant share of that market among organizations running Windows infrastructure.

Attachmate acquired Novell on April 27, 2011 for $2.2 billion.⁴ Attachmate, which had previously acquired NetIQ in 2006, reorganized Novell's identity and security products—including eDirectory—under the NetIQ brand.⁵ The product has been marketed as NetIQ eDirectory since that reorganization.

Micro Focus International completed its acquisition of the Attachmate Group on November 5, 2014,⁶ absorbing the Novell, NetIQ, Attachmate, and SUSE product lines.

OpenText acquired Micro Focus and closed the transaction on February 1, 2023 for approximately $5.8 billion,⁷ making OpenText the current owner of the eDirectory product line. The software continues to be distributed under the NetIQ brand.

eDirectory uses dynamic rights inheritance, allowing both global and specific access controls. Access rights to objects in the tree are determined at the time of the request based on object location, security equivalences, and individual assignments. The software supports partitioning at any point in the tree and replication of any partition to any number of servers. Replication between servers occurs using incremental deltas. Each server holding a non-read-only replica can act as a master of its information. Replicas may be filtered to include only defined attributes—for example, a replica configured for use as a corporate address book containing only name and phone number.

The software supports referential integrity and multi-master replication. It can be accessed via LDAP, DSML, SOAP, ODBC, JDBC, JNDI, and ADSI.

Current supported platforms for eDirectory 9.2.x include:⁸

• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• Microsoft Windows Server
• Oracle Solaris

Legacy platforms supported in earlier versions included Novell NetWare, IBM AIX, HP-UX, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008.

Novell designed eDirectory to store operational server configuration data alongside user account information. A typical eDirectory tree contains objects representing servers, software services (such as LDAP, email, and DNS), print queues, and network configuration (such as DHCP). This differs from directory services that store only identity information.

Versions of eDirectory prior to version 8 used Recman, a record-based database management engine that depended on the Transaction Tracking System built into the NetWare operating system. Since version 8, eDirectory uses the FLAIM (FLexible Adaptable Information Management) database engine, also used by the GroupWise collaboration suite from version 5. Novell released FLAIM as open-source software under the GPL in February 2006,⁹ enabling eDirectory to run on platforms beyond NetWare.