Lotus Connections LDAP Support

So a friendly Microsoft salesman was kind enough to send this link to Paul Mooney’s blog entry on Lotus Connections 1.0 and it’s lack of support for Domino LDAP to some folks at my company. This of course landed in my inbox as I am in the middle of building a pilot environment for Lotus Connections. First off, this was a major blunder by IBM releasing a product under the Lotus name, which lacked support for the Lotus Domino LDAP, there is no getting around this issue. When this first came up back in March here was a comment I made to IBM

Perhaps the name Lotus Connections is not quite right for this product, as that should indicate that it is compatible with the rest of the Lotus product line, I think it is great that IBM does not force you to use Domino LDAP and that you can use IBM Products against other vendors LDAP if that is your configuration, but certainly you should not be penalized for being an all Lotus shop.

With that out of the way let me now clarify what you can today with Domino LDAP (yes even though it is not “supported”). You can use Domino LDAP to authenticate your users to Lotus Connections, what you can not do out of the box is use Tivoli Directory Integrator which ships with connections to synchronize data between Connections and other applications (for example pulling in reporting structure data from SAP). I have various pieces of connections working today using Domino LDAP, and hope to have all five services up sometime next week, leaving out the TDI piece for now. To configure LDAP I used the Instructions from the Sametime Gateway intall which is similar as they are both Websphere Application Servers. While this is not supported, if your goal is like mine which is to get 20 people in to Connections as a pilot to figure out where it belongs in the enterprise this will get you going. IBM has promised support for Domino LDAP in version 1.0.2 which is due out in October, which gives me time to build the environment and then have time to play with TDI when it will support Domino LDAP. It is interesting that Microsoft felt the need to point this out, true Microsoft never has any problems like this, they only support their applications with Active Directory. IBM on the other hand lets you run Sametime, Quickr, Connections with out requiring that you be a Domino shop, it is even rumored that efforts are underway for the next version of Domino (Not 8, but whatever is next) to allow the Domino Server to run with user credentials coming from another source i.e AD. So no excuse IBM this was a bad move, but thanks Microsoft for pointing out how easy it is when you support only one option.