The New York State Education Department is one of the largest state agencies and conducts business with each of the 705 NYS school districts and 33 Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES).

NYSED, like most state agencies, is working toward conducting more business via the web. The LDAP is an important part of managing the increase in business conducted on the web. NYSED had several applications both in production and in development that each implemented its own user profile data and security methods. NYSED was in need of a single, standard method of verifying users across the various systems.

IS Consilium, Inc was contracted by New York State Education Department (NYSED) to design and develop the agency's Lightweight Directory Application Protocol (LDAP). In order to accomplish the objective, IS Consilium held a series of Joint Application Development (JAD) sessions to identify the directory and attribute information necessary to construct a solution utilizing Oracle's Internet Directory (OID) software. OID is a native, LDAP Version-3 compliant directory service which runs as an application on an Oracle database. This architecture is a very robust and secure platform for enterprise directory services. By implementing the LDAP server as an Oracle application, OID can provide LDAP directory services with a high level of scalability, availability and information security. IS Consilium services included installing the Oracle software, conducting the JAD sessions as well as designing and implementing the directory services. The end result was a directory service that is a flexible, special-purpose distribution database designed to enable the storage and retrieval of entry-oriented information for a wide range of applications.