Re: Forwarded mail from John Curran

[Erik Huizer <[e-mail]>]

John,

Thanks for your comments. I agree with all of them, and do realise that we
need to create a strong incentive to make sure people will move to X.500
without to much effort, and with lot's of bemnefit. This does not require
just an operational plan, or a very positive executive summary, but like you
point out also cheap/free good software, easy registration, and in my view
good datamanagement plans/software/tools and (especially for non-us)
guidelines on how to set up an X.500 database in line with existing privacty
laws.

This together is a complex issue, some of which does apply to directory
services in general, not just X.500 (also whois++). It is to those issues
that a new WG (IDS) is going to take a look. OSI-ds is working on the
Quality and availability of software (DSA, DUA and dataman tools). I think
that the publication of the LDAP standards will contribute to, more and
better software becoming available. I refer you to the U0Michigan for
deployment of this. Also, what I feel will be potentially an enormous boost
to popularity of directory services is the gateway between Gopher and X.500.
This gives users easy acess to the data in an X.500 directory.

All these developments will hopefullly lead to a situation where we can
justify pushing people and organisations into using X.500 because the
benefits are worth it.

Erik


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