I read some blogs about the LDAP integration in liferay and understood that LDAP is a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol for accessing and maintaining distributed directory information services over an Internet Protocol (IP) network.
Also it is mainly for user authentication.
Still I am blind in my mind where exactly and in which scenarios do we need to use the LDAP?
Can anyone please explain this in brief with simple real time example.
Liferay as a portal platform also keeps track of user identity. If you have your existing user database already in LDAP (because that's what has been established as a standard) you probably don't want to recreate it in the portal. In fact, many other applications might need this data as well and they all connect to LDAP (again, because that's the standard format).
Thus Liferay allows you to tap into the standard as well.
If you don't have your users in LDAP yet, you might not need to bother. If you start with the user database in Liferay and it grows large, needing to be shared with many other applications, you might want to migrate to LDAP later. And, funny enough, there's also a plugin (EE only) to Liferay that publishes Liferay's user database in the LDAP format. But now we're going quite meta.