I haven’t been an early adopter of the iPhone, mostly because it only became available in France with the 3G model, but since I bought mine I’ve been really pleased with it (apart from the short battery lifetime). Like most iPhone users, I’ve downloaded and added a few apps, but I’ve been reluctant to pay for apps that I couldn’t try before…

Until yesterday !

Yesterday, Anton Bobrov, a co-worker and developer on the OpenDS project, still maintainer of the Netscape LDAP SDK, told me that his Directory application was available on the App Store. I knew it was it the work, and knowing Anton I was expecting some pretty well crafted application.

Indeed, Directory is a simple, clean and lean LDAP query application that allows iPhone and iPodTouch users to search their corporate directory servers (or LDAP savvy developers to test their development server ;-).). Directory provides secure access and authentication to the server and allows to dial, email or add contacts in the local address book.

I’m currently using it to access Sun‘s externally accessible phone directory, but I’ve tested it successfully with both Sun Directory Server and OpenDS.

Here’s the settings that I’ve used (once you’ve installed the Directory application, there is a "Directory" section in the Settings application).

Identity: cn=John Smith (12345),ou=people,dc=sun,dc=com

[your Sun ID should be enclosed in brackets and watch the spaces]

Password: My Sun password

LDAP: book.sun.com

(Keep the remaining untouched).

Thanks Anton for this long desired application which will save me a lot of time in the future. May I request the ability to have multiple LDAP accounts and easily switch from one to another ?

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