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Cisco Personal Assistant 1.4 Installation and Administration Guide
OL-4590-03
Chapter 2 Installing and Upgrading Personal Assistant
Setting Up Active Directory as the Corporate Directory for Personal Assistant
Using an LDIF File
LDIF is a standard format used to import and export data from an LDAP directory. You can set up
Personal Assistant to read from an LDIF file to obtain information from the corporate directory when
the system refreshes and when it restarts. By default, Personal Assistant uses an LDAP query, which can
result in a large amount of network traffic, depending on the size of the data and the complexity of the
system. Instead of having each server in a multiple Personal Assistant cluster run a large,
resource-intensive LDAP query, you can set up an LDIF file at a shared location and configure each
server to read from it.
Note that Personal Assistant will still use LDAP queries for functions such as name-dialing, searching
the corporate directory to copy users to the address book, and so on.
To use an LDIF file, you first set up the system to generate the LDIF file that includes attributes specific
to Personal Assistant. When you later configure the corporate directory, you specify the location of this
file. The “To Configure the Corporate Directory” procedure on page 4-8 will alert you when to do this.
Table 2-2 lists the Personal Assistant attributes required in the LDIF file. Note that in addition to the
listed fields, if you configured directory hierarchies that use other attributes (for example, City=San
Jose), you must include the additional attributes in the file. See the “Sample LDIF File Creation” section
below for an example of how to set up an LDIF file for Personal Assistant.
mobile Cell Phone
homeNumber Home Phone
pager Pager Address
mail E-mail Address
Table 2-1 Personal Assistant Attributes (continued)
Active Directory Attribute Name Attribute Name in Personal Assistant
Tab l e 2-2 LDIF File Attributes
LDAP Attribute Name Attribute Name in Personal Assistant
cn, uid, or sAMAccountName Unique Attribute
givenName First Name
sn Last Name
alias Nick Name
telephoneNumber Work P hone
mobile Cell Phone
homeNumber Home Phone
pager Pager Address
mail E-mail Address