P309 Pan-European Directory Services - Phase II

Rationale
X.500 based directories are emerging and are being piloted in a co-ordinated way in multivendor networks both by American service providers and by the European academic community. It is of paramount importance that the European Service providers also take co-ordinated action as soon as possible in order to keep the European infrastructure up to date.
The importance of X.500 based directory services is generally acknowledged as:

• vital to the increase in the use and usability of new and existing services (telephony, telematic services)
• vital to the offering of extensive possibilities in areas like authentication, secure messaging, mobile communication etc.

Objectives
The main objective of this project is the establishing of a prototype of the future X.500 Directory.
Such a prototype system could pave the way to the provision of future X.500 services by permitting:

• operational/performance evaluation of a real distributed heterogeneous Directory
• test/validation of X.500 equipment in a near operational configuration
• test/validation of possibly national - specific X.500 architecture with emphasis on inter working equipment such as X.500 First level DSA or X.500 Gateway to existing Electronic Directory.

In addition such a pilot could serve the purpose of:

• promoting X.500 awareness among PNOs, private domains and private users
• demonstrating PNOs capability and willingness to provide operational X.500 services
• providing one of the necessary building blocks for developing future European Teleservices
• providing a representative forum for analysing and solving technical and non-technical problems of the directory service.

Participants AF BT CH DK DT FT IT NL RB ST TE TF PT TI

Duration - Project start: Jul 93 - Project completion: Nov 96

Results for Full Publication

Deliverable 1 - Detailed Specification of Pilot Project Plan
Deliverable 2 - Final Deliverable