Storing user profile in a corporate environment. Where, how and why?

Question

I'm a programmer and don't know much about Active Directory, LDAP, etc. What I'm trying to build is some kind of profile web page for each employee where I work. Something similar to this : http://intranet-matters.de/files/chr-hansen-my-profile.jpg

Do I need LDAP server to store email addresses, phone numbers, Employee ID, organization hierarchy, job title, etc.? Should I try to program my own back end to manage this information or should I try to pull from a LDAP server? Can I use our existing Active Directory to store and retrieve the information I need?

We already have a LDAP server for our phone system (Alcatel-Lucent). Should I try to learn how it works? The vendor doesn't know how LDAP works. They only install the system and support it, they don't sell programming consulting for using the server.

Is there another solution I could use?

As noted in the answer from @mfinni, SharePoint would do this easily. Do you have SharePoint in your organizeation? — Dave M, May 11 '11 at 18:15

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered May 11 '11 at 18:10

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AD's LDAP does indeed already have fields for all of those things you're asking for. You just have to write a webpage that can query and display in the fashion you want.

Although what you're showing in that screenshot is something from SharePoint, which if you already have, why build your own?

answered May 11 '11 at 18:10

mfinni

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I don't have sharepoint and don't intend to use it atm. As for AD, where do I store employee number, mobile phone numbers, multiple email addresses, etc.? – Philippe May 11 '11 at 19:18
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Those are stored as properties in the user object in AD – Holocryptic May 11 '11 at 20:22
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Philippe - have you looked at an AD instance yet? You'd see this stuff pretty quickly if you used something like ADExplorer from Sysinternals. – mfinni May 11 '11 at 20:47

Storing user profile in a corporate environment. Where, how and why?

1 Answers1