Although the development of LDAP 3 is proceeding swiftly, few full-featured
LDAP clients are available. Netscape Communicator's and Microsoft IE's email
applications include a simple LDAP white-pages client (and the browser in
Preview Release 3 of Netscape Communicator 4.0 can use the LDAP URL format to
display more extensive directory information), but you can't use either client
to fully test an LDAP service by modifying directory information.
You can, however, use SWIX, a public domain LDAP-based X.500 client created
at the University of Umeå in Sweden. With SWIX, you can bind any
LDAP-based directory (such as Netscape Directory Server or an NDS server running
Novell's LDAP Service) and add, browse, or modify directory entries
For example, as Screen A shows, you can use SWIX to modify the attributes
of an NDS user object. After binding (i.e., authenticating) to the LDAP Services
for NDS using an NDS account with the appropriate rights, the user can browse
the directory tree by expanding an organizational unit to display the tree's
objects. After you highlight an object and select Modify from the Directory
menu, SWIX shifts into an edit mode. You can change any attribute shown before
clicking the Update button to write the changes to the directory. You can
download SWIX 2.4 from the Windows NT Magazine's Web site at
http://www.winntmag.com.