Planning Namespace Hierarchy for an Enterprise Service Portal

Each enterprise service portal that you install must have a namespace that defines the location of its configuration in the directory. The namespaces form a hierarchy of LDAP entries, and a namespace inherits all the properties defined in its parent namespaces. Properties defined in subordinate namespaces override properties of the same name inherited from parent namespaces. Multiple enterprise service portals can use the same namespace if all the properties in the configurations are identical.

For example, in the sample data, the namespaces for Enterprise Manager Portal and NAT Address Management Portal are subordinate to the namespace for the sample Enterprise Service Portal (see Table 17). Consequently, the subordinate configurations inherit property definitions from the sample Enterprise Service Portal configuration, unless specific settings in the subordinate configurations override those in the sample Enterprise Service Portal configuration.

You can use the hierarchy of namespaces to minimize the number of properties you configure for a particular instance of an enterprise service portal. For example, suppose you want to deploy two instances of Enterprise Manager Portal in different POPs—Ottawa and Montreal. The POPs use the same directory for services; however, each POP uses its own directory for subscribers.

To minimize the number of properties you configure for the enterprise service portal, you can:

1. Create the following two namespaces subordinate to l=ENT-MGR, l=EASP, ou=staticConfiguration, ou=Configuration, o=Management, o=umc:

   • l=ENT-MGR-Ottawa

   • l=ENT-MGR-Montreal

2. Configure information about the service directory in l=ENT-MGR, l=EASP, ou=staticConfiguration, ou=Configuration, o=Management, o=umc.

3. Configure information about the respective subscriber directories in l=ENT-MGR-Ottawa and l=ENT-MGR-Montreal.