One of the least understood configurations for FileMaker Server is the Directory Service that you'll find right here. This setting has nothing at all to do with the Security Tab that's right here. The Directory Service Setting does not play a role in the authentication of users. Whether you use external authentication or not here on the Security Tab has nothing to do with the Directory Service. What you can do here is register FileMaker Server to a directory service and compare that to writing an entry in a phonebook. The only reason you would use this setting here is to give users another way of finding a FileMaker Server. But it is for locating the FileMaker Server only. There's nothing for giving them access to the hosted files. Before we dive in, let's clear up some terminology. In its simplest form, and it is a bit of a simplification, a directory service is exactly just like the phonebook that we mentioned earlier. It's a big list of people and resources, like printers, shared folders, applications, etcetera. Windows has Active Directory. Apple has Open Directory. Then there's Open LDAP in the LINUX world and Novell has its E Directory. LDAP stands for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. LDAP is a communication protocol for talking to a directory service. Using LDAP syntax, you can query a directory service or provide information to it, just like SQL is to a database or HTTP is to a web application. All the major directory services that we've just mentioned before are LDAP-compliant. That means that you can use LDAP syntax to work with them. There are other protocols that work with directory services but LDAP is the most standardized and widely accepted. Because of that, sometimes people use the term LDAP when they really mean a directory service. Back to our configuration. Unlike external authentication on the Security Tab, which works only with the Windows Active Directory or the OS X Open Directory, you can register FileMaker Server to any LDAP-compliant directory service. For this example, we're going to work with the Active Directory. This is a connection to my domain controller running Active Directory. And this window actually shows what's inside my Active Directory. And important for this story is the organizational unit that we've created called FileMaker. And for the moment, there's nothing in there. What I want to do is for each FileMaker Server to announce itself whenever it starts up. And in order to do that, we turn to the Directory Service Tab right here in the Admin Console. The first setting that we need is the address of the domain controller, the address of where the Active Directory is located and we can use the DNS name of the machine or we can just use the IP Address of where the thing is running. You can change the default LDAP port right here to something else and that depends on your exact directory service deployment. The biggest challenge is in creating the next entry; the distinguish name. If registering your FileMaker Server fails, it is usually because the exact syntax of the distinguish name is not perfect. Explaining how it works is well beyond the scope of this tutorial and it largely depends on what brand of directory service you use and what the internal structure is inside your directory service. This is the distinguish name that works for us in our example. The organizational unit is called FileMaker and it's inside our directory service for the connecting data domain. Depending on how security is set up on your directory service, you may need to specify a specific account that has rights to actually write information back to the directory service. Now, with this set up we can go ahead and test our settings. And as you can see, they were successful. Now we can move on to the next page. This is where we say let's go ahead and publish my FileMaker Server and also actually go ahead and publish some of our contact information that we've set up in the General Settings Page of our Admin Console. Now, let's go check the Log Viewer to see if we have any errors. And here you can see the confirmation of all of the settings. But the most important one here is at the bottom where it says Registration with Directory Service Succeeded. Now, if we go back and check our domain controller and do a refresh here, we can now see that our FileMaker Server actually shows up. So what's the use of this then? Well, inside your FileMaker Pro, if you look at the Open Remote Dialog, we know that we can go look for a host on our local network, we can specify some of our favorite hosts but we can also have hosts looked up by LDAP. And if we specify the same settings here as we specified in setting up our directory service connection from the FileMaker Server Console, we can see that our FileMaker Server 10 machine that was listed in the Active Directory in the directory service will also show up here. So what we've given the users is another way of finding a FileMaker Server. And this is useful mostly in large companies where the users and the FileMaker Servers are not necessarily on the same network segments. You will remember that FileMaker Server uses the Apple Module Technology to scan the user's subnet for all available FileMaker Servers and that's to populate the local services list. This one. If the server is not on the same segment as the user, then this list might be empty. If the server is configured to announce itself to a directory service and the client is configured to access the same directory service, then the server will show up here.