Documenting and Publishing Your Schemas

Documenting all the schemas you use within your directory service is important for several reasons. First, you may need the schema information when you add additional servers to your service. Second, you can share your schema documentation with software vendors and authors of custom applications to aid in design, development, and troubleshooting. Finally, if you create a new, useful schema, you can easily share your design with others and consider promoting it as a standard.

When documenting schemas, you can use any format you want, but we recommend the LDAPv3 format, which is the one used by most software and throughout this book. However, if you have already chosen directory service software, you may want to use its favored format. You should also identify the attribute types and object classes you plan to use and add their names to the data elements list you created during the data design process (see Chapter 7, Data Design).

We recommend that you publish your directory schema definitions at least within your own organization. Schema information is useful to users of the directory and developers of directory-enabled applications. If you want other organizations and independent software vendors to adopt your schemas, you should publish them on an external Web site or in another appropriate place where everyone will have access to them.

Finally, if you plan to promote some schema elements that you designed for consideration as a standard, you should publish them using the process defined by the standards body. For the IETF, which handles most Internet standards (including LDAP), this means writing an Internet Draft and submitting it to the IETF secretariat for publication. Connect to the IETF World Wide Web site at http://www.ietf.org for more information on how to contribute. Other groups, such as the DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force) and OASIS (the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), help organizations develop and publish industry standards.