Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is an Internet protocol used to maintain authentication data that may include departments, people, groups of people, passwords, email addresses, and printers. LDAP consists of a data-representation scheme, a set of defined operations, and a request/response network.

The scale of LDAP servers range from big public servers such as BigFoot and Infospace, to large organizational servers at universities and corporations, to small LDAP servers for workgroups that may be using OpenLDAP. This document focuses on the institutional and workgroup applications of LDAP.

This section includes: