Highlight Week: Explaining LDAP

I'm going over some of my older posts and am reposting some of the good stuff that's still relevant. I've been at this a while, so there is a good week's worth of good essays hiding in the archives.
This one got some inbound links and attracted several readers. The question was asked on ServerFault but I had to echo by reply on my blog since it was too juicy. I've been working with directories since 1996 when I first ran into Novell NDS, so the concepts behind LDAP are engraved on my bones it seems like. So explaining it to someone else is an effort in... restraint of information. They don't need to know every little detail, just enough to get the concepts.

I still get wordy.

Explaining LDAP.