Determining Data Ownership - Netscape DIRECTORY SERVER 7.0 - DEPLOYMENT Deployment Manual

Performing a Site Survey
How you maintain master copies of your data depends on your specific needs.
However, regardless of how you maintain data masters, keep it simple and
consistent. For example, you should not attempt to master data in multiple sites,
then automatically exchange data between competing applications. Doing so
leads to a "last change wins" scenario and increases your administrative
overhead.
For example, suppose you want to manage an employee's home telephone
number. Both the LDAP directory and a human resources database store this
information.The human resources application is LDAP enabled, so you can write
an automatic application that transfers data from the LDAP directory to the
human resources database, and vice versa. However, if you attempt to master
changes to that employee's telephone number in both the LDAP directory and the
human resources data, then the last place where the telephone number was
changed overwrites the information in the other database. This is acceptable as
long as the last application to write the data had the correct information. But if
that information was old or out of date (perhaps because, for example, the human
resources data was reloaded from a backup), then the correct telephone number
in the LDAP directory will be deleted.

Determining Data Ownership

Data ownership refers to the person or organization responsible for making sure
the data is up-to-date. During the data design, decide who can write data to the
directory. Some common strategies for deciding data ownership follow:
• Allow read-only access to the directory for everyone except a small group of
directory content managers.
• Allow individual users to manage some strategic subset of information for
themselves.
This subset of information might include their passwords, descriptive
information about themselves and their role within the organization, their
automobile license plate number, and contact information such as telephone
numbers or office numbers.
• Allow a person's manager to write to some strategic subset of that person's
information, such as contact information or job title.
• Allow an organization's administrator to create and manage entries for that
organization.
This approach makes your organization's administrators your directory
content managers.
34 Netscape Directory Server Deployment Guide • October 2004