Organisations within organisations

[Andrew Waugh <[e-mail]>]

We have had an interesting X.500 question asked of us, and I wondered
if anyone else has been asked (and answered!) the question.

The question was asked by a large company which has subsidiary
companies. Where should these subsidiary companies be placed in the
DIT and what object class should they be?

The subsidiary companies could be treated as ordinary Australian
companies and placed in the tree immediately underneath the
Australian entry. This is ideal for people outside the companies
querying the database who aren't aware that the companies are
actually subsidiary companies.

However, the companies are actually subsidiaries and should also
appear as part of the organisational structure under the owning
company's entry. This is because, internally to the company, the
subsiduaries are treated like any other organizationalUnits.

The obvious solution is to put organizational entries for the
subsiduaries underneath the organizational entry for the owning
company. If the subsiduary also appeared in the directory as a
company in its own right, one or other of the entries could be an
alias for the other.

However, the recommended structure rules (X.521, Annex B) clearly
don't intend organisational entries to be nested in this way. These
structure rules are not changed in the 1992 DIS.

We could ignore the recommended structure rules and allow nested
organisational entries. But this leaves open the possibility that
any DUAs purchased might _assume_ the recommended structuring rules
and not work at all, or fail in odd ways, when presented with this
tree structure.

We could make the internal entries be organizationalUnit entries and
make them aliases which point to the real organizational entries.
This is a horrible perversion of the idea of aliases, and I don't
know what DUAs would do with this sudden change of object classes.

Basically, it boils down to the problem that the organisational
structure assumed by the standard seems overly simplistic...

What do people think?

Andrew Waugh				  

------------------------------------------------------------------------
CSIRO Division of Information Technology            Open Systems Program
723 Swanston Street                               (phone) [phone]
Carlton, VIC 3053, Australia                        (fax) [phone]
                       email: [e-mail]
------------------------------------------------------------------------