LDAP Design Help Requested

[Stephen Anderson <stephena@HiWAAY.net>]

I was hoping you guys could help me decide on a high level design for my
openldap based system.

The place where I work is considering moving from ccMail to an SMTP/POP3
based mail system.  The problem is loss of directory services.  So I piped
up and mentioned LDAP.  So I now have to design an LDAP email directory
service for our company.

My question is this, in our company we have several sites around the
country.  Does anyone have any idea whether it would be better to
implement the directory service as one LDAP database that's replicated to
all the sites, or as seperate site specific databases that can contact
each other.

the latter sounds better to me since the bulk of email is sent within a
site, but I'm not sure how to implement the system such that users can
seemlessly query remote site's LDAP servers for email addresses at other
locations.  Oh, the client we are loking at using is either Outlook
Express or Netscape's mail client.

Any ideas, thoughts,ruminations, or stories would be greatly appreciated.


                                       Stephen Anderson
                                     <stephena@HiWAAY.net>