Most production Alfresco implementations use something other than Alfresco to authenticate. That's because many enterprises already have a central user directory, and it makes a lot of sense to have Alfresco take advantage of that. There are almost as many different approaches to authentication as there are applications. Microsoft shops will often run NTLM or Kerberos authentication, both of which are supported by Alfresco. Most of the time, though, companies store users in one or more LDAP directories and then configure applications to authenticate against those directories.

In this chapter, the directions refer to OpenLDAP. There are other open source LDAP servers available such as Fedora Directory Server and Apache Directory. Proprietary directory servers also work with Alfresco. The most common one is Microsoft Active Directory, but others such as Sun ONE Directory Server and Novell eDirectory are known to work with Alfresco as well.