The AE SLAPD installation is self-documenting. Once the program sdinstall.exe is executed and the installation session is done, the Directory Manager windows application can used as an alternative to the MSDOS command line utilities ldapadd, ldapmodify, ldapsearch and ldapdelete to respectively add, modify, search or delete entries in the running (on-line) database. Directory Manager allows LDAP protocol operations to be used to add/modify/delete values directly to the running server. It can also dump the running server to an off-line LDAP Interchange Format (LDIF) representation (LDIF.TXT) for portability and archiving. The relationships between the processes and files are depicted below.

figure - AE SLAPD components and key files

The command utilities are described in the Directory Manager on-line help, and are fully compatible with those in the U. Mich Unix LDAP distribution, and OpenLDAP. The Directory Manager provides a convenient graphical user interface to update user entries, however, for daily administrative operations, the command utilities should be considered to allow automated or batch updates of the live directory, and dump/backup to LDIF. LDIF is the key to exchanging data with other applications and is supported as an output format by most address books that support LDAP on-line searches.

NOTE: The Directory Manager performs a basic configuration to create  the top level organization and administrative role.  Advanced configuration settings for performance and security must be made manually to the configuration file slapd.conf . It is advised that all other changes to the running directory be made via a client, such as the LDAP Administrator.