At this very moment, every company on the planet is trying to find ways to reduce cost.  A creative and innovative member of the Directory Server team at Sun has come up with a way to do just that using the iPhone and LDAP.  Ludo's blog post located here, provides a great overview of the technical detail (what tools, platform, etc.) so please read it for more detail on how Anton put this solution together.  Let's focus on the business angle of this important innovation using LDAP.  Again, we hope David Kearns is reading because this is really what "Pimping Your Directory" is all about.

More and more companies are having to support mobile workforces or employees that work a portion of their time at home.  Sun has been one of the leaders in this space.  Not only does it improve productivity but it gives knowledgeworkers more empowerment thus improving their quality of work and life and thus loyalty to the company that employs them.  However, the tools that support these workers have been slow to catch-up.  Company Directories are a good example.  How many times do employees call the 1-800 number to get an employee number to make a phone call on the road?  As a consultant, I used to do this all the time.  As a Sun employee, I have used this feature more than once while traveling to different trade shows, between offices, etc.  This ties up valuable resources who could be routing real customer calls! I have realized this paradox but when you have to get something done you go through the path of least resistance.  And, let's face it voice portals have not replaced human beings in either efficiency or effectiveness.

Here is where the innovator at Sun, Anton Bobrov, filled the gap. The Sun IT and Directory Teams recognized this gap a long time ago and placed a limited version of the employee directory outside the firewall.  It is a great tool if you have a web browser and don't want to VPN into the network.  However, Anton realized there was a better solution via the iPhone.  He has developed an iPhone App that is an LDAP browser that allows employees to connect to this Directory outside the firewall and quickly search, find an employee and make the phone call from one device.  My vote for iPhone App of the Year would be for the LDAP app by Zen and our very own Anton Bobrov. 

The Business Case

So hypothetically, using Company A with 33,000 employees as an example, imagine 5% of employees have an iPhone.  Imagine that same 5% make one phone call a week or 52 calls per year to the 1-800 number to get a phone call.  Imagine each call takes 2 min of productivity away from the call center employee then this simple application could save approximately 2,860 hours.  Put another way this is 1.43 FTE per year worth of productivity.

Number of Employees	33,000 Employees
Percent that have iPhone	5% Employees
Number of Employees with iPhone	1,650 Employees
Number of calls made per year to 1-800 per week by one employee	52 calls per year per employee
Total number of calls made in a year	85,800 calls per year
Total number of hours taken (avg time per search 2 min)	2,860 hours
Number of Employees Needed to Cover this Task (50 weeks * 40 hours)	1.43 FTE's

Please see Ludo's blog for more detail on how the app works and what Anton did to build it.  His bog is located here.

How do you get it?

Go to the App Store and seach "LDAP".  You want to download the Zen version for $3.99.  Refer to the cost savings table above if you balk at the price.  Here are the configuration details for Sun's directory, as described in Ludo's blog here.

Here's the settings that I've used (once you've installed the Directory application, there is a "Directory" section in the Settings application).

Identity: cn=John Smith (12345),ou=people,dc=sun,dc=com
[your Sun ID should be enclosed in brackets and watch the spaces]
Password: My Sun password
LDAP: book.sun.com
(Keep the remaining untouched).

How do I get one for my company?

If you are employee at a company that has a large mobile workforce you should show this blog post to an IT Director, Call Center Director, or someone who can make this project happen.  This is a quick win for most companies in improving productivity.  You can use DSEE or OpenDS with replication to create the directory instance outside the firewall.  Publish a configuration guide for employees and start improving productivity.

Benoit Chaffanjon did an interesting "Benchmarketing" (you have to read his blog to understand why he calls it that) that showed Directory Server Enterprise Edition may be able to support 450,000 + LDAP operations per second.   The benchmarketing was done on a Sun Blade 6000 using the Intel Xeon x5560 on OpenSolaris.  All the gory details can be read in Benoit's blog here.  This is mind-blowing when you consider the cost of transaction per second and also what this might look like on an SSD.  We are doing some further testing as Mark Craig mentions in his blog not only to validate these amazing results but also to confirm the performance using OpenSSO and on a SSD.

You can Try It by clicking button below:

Here is one table taken from Benoit's blog

Modify Operations Performed  

Count	Avg/Second	Avg/Interval	Std Dev	Corr Coeff
4806293	4179.383	20896.913	55.65	-0.061

Modify Time (ms)  

Total Duration	Total Count	Avg Duration	Avg Count/Interval	Std Dev	Corr Coeff
29812733	480600	6.203	20895.652	0.19	-0.068

Search Operations Performed  

Count	Avg/Second	Avg/Interval	Std Dev	Corr Coeff
38452462	33436.922	167184.609	447.43	-0.061

Initial Search Time (ms)  

Total Duration	Total Count	Avg Duration	Avg Count/Interval	Std Dev	Corr Coeff
5000859	4807211	10.403	20900.913	0.375	0.015

Subsequent Search Time (ms)  

Total Duration	Total Count	Avg Duration	Avg Count/Interval	Std Dev	Corr Coeff
146366814	33643572	4.351	146276.391	0.189	0.171

You can Try and Buy one of these machines today. 

The team is back from our successful trip to the European Identity Conference.  Ludo and Mark Craig did a great job on the Identity Bus and Virtual Directory panels.  We will have more about this later in the week.  

We wanted to pass along a quick note about an upcomming webinar on Directory Services which will be held May 20.  The webinar will cover how to reduce cost and improve the speed and performance of your enterprise using directory services.  The conversation will go over the following:

• How to use save cost by consolidating identity sprawl in your enterprise
  
• How to meet agressive time-lines on a merger and acquisition
  
• How to federate faster with virtual directories

If you are interested, please sign-up here.  Even if you are not able to attend, registering will give you access to the replay.

Oh, and that is not Craig MacDonald in the picture to the right.  We got this from a very talented photographer in the Creative Commons here.

Ludo Poitou and Mark Craig from Sun Microsystems will be a part of two illustrious panels at the European Identity Conference today.  Ludo will be a part of the panel talking about the Identity Bus which is a topic that Felix Gaethens, Kim Cameron, and David Kearns talked about last year.  The discussion should be interesting becasue Sun has some of the products necessary to create the "identity bus" today through OpenDS, DSEE, Virtual Directory, OpenSSO, Identity Manager Connectors, and Netbeans,  You don't need all of these to create the bus but a standards based way of storiing and accessing identities and then leveraging them via other applications or into the cloud are all possible using the tools at Sun.

Mark Craig will be joining Oracle, Radiant Logic and Symlabs in talking about Virtual Directories and their importance to Directory Services.  Sun includes it's virtual directory features as a part of it's core product and license so all customers who use DSEE 6.3 today have a virtual directory already as a part of their license.  Mark will be explaining how customers are using Virtual Directory to do data center consolidation, simplify mergers and acquisitions, and federate faster using Sun's Virtual Directory.