Managing IMAP

IMSP, ACAP, or LDAP?

If centralized user preference management were thought of as a nail, not everyone would agree what kind of hammer is needed. Two come to mind: IMSP and ACAP. One doesn’t: LDAP.

There are a couple of reasons why LDAP doesn’t really fit here. The lesser of the two is that LDAP is tuned to perform best in a read-intensive environment. ACAP, on the other hand, is designed to work in a mixed read/write environment, such as one where users are constantly updating preferences.

But the greater of the two reasons is that the structure of a user’s configuration information, such as bookmarks and addresses, is defined by the administrator under LDAP and is static. Under ACAP, the ordering is determined by the user and can be changed on the fly. LDAP is a good fit for enterprise-wide information; it’s not necessarily a good fit for email preferences storage, because each user tends to cultivate a very personalized directory of their own.

Users are likely to use LDAP-based services for tasks like finding someone’s email address. Once they find it, however, they’re likely to want to store it in their own address book, so they can make it meaningful in ways that are not supported in LDAP, such as:

• Tying the address to an easier-to-type nickname

• Taking advantage of auto-completion in their client

• Adding additional information that wouldn’t necessarily be germane to a central directory, such as notes from the last meeting, private telephone numbers, names of spouse ...