Symlabs Expands Virtual Directory Features and Performance

CHICAGO, Jan 25 /PRNewswire/ -- Symlabs, a global leader in identity management, is pleased to announce the availability of a new release for the industry's fastest virtual directory products. Version 5.5 of Symlabs Virtual Directory Server and Symlabs LDAP Proxy adds powerful features that embrace today's most popular technologies, a host of useability enhancements to make operation smoother and easier, plus greater performance than ever before.

This latest release from Symlabs delivers tighter integration with Active Directory infrastructures and Kerberos cryptography, which is key to Single Sign-On (SSO), Microsoft central authentication, and a broad range of applications. Symlabs Virtual Directory Server now provides a comprehensive GSSAPI/SASL interface that allows Kerberos authentication on a front-end listener, or alternatively to authenticate against back-end repositories, so applications not designed to work in an Active Directory environment can be easily integrated. A new automatic HTTP server groups feature makes it easy to integrate B2B applications via web services or generic XML over SOAP, and includes built-in health-checking, fail-over session handling, plus plug-ins that handle routing of requests to appropriate back-end servers and logging. Additional new plug-ins give Active Directory systems administrators powerful functionality, such as linking attributes across entries or working around schema modifications, that greatly enhances their management tools.

"The Symlabs product allows us to address complex directory and authentication challenges without high licensing or development costs," said Toby Gaff of the Lincoln Financial Group. "We can add new applications into our environment quickly and easily today plus gain the flexibility to adapt for tomorrow, all while achieving better performance than by connecting directly to the back-end directory."

Symlabs Virtual Directory Server and Symlabs LDAP Proxy now offer even faster speed, particularly under Windows, with health monitoring and connection pooling functions getting special attention to performance, greater flexibility, and new capabilities. A major focus on useability has resulted in many GUI enhancements, simpler options, improved validation of configurations, plus extended help and documentation. Of particular interest to enterprise clients with a customized environment, a new extensions facility dramatically simplifies the use of manual processing stages by making it possible to download and install new plug-ins as required. This allows friendly user interfaces for key manual processing stages to be created externally, then incorporated into the existing GUI essentially as custom plug-ins that let the GUI evolve to support future solutions. Many standard plug-ins have also been added, including one for DN Suffix Mapping that makes it easier to work with group entries in a virtual tree and an easy-to-use security plug-in that restricts data views based on simple criteria. Both products can now integrate with an external LDAP browser, however this release also includes a newly developed, fully-featured, SSL-capable, standalone LDAP browser which is certain to be a favorite of administrators, and they can apply it across their entire infrastructure if they choose.

According to Jeff Zukowski, Partner and Director of Marketing for Symlabs, "This release blazes a new trail for the market. We've incorporated lots of input from customers and we're sure they will appreciate the improvements to the GUI, the powerful LDAP Browser, the new and enhanced plug-ins that make it easier to build custom solutions, and the new extension manager that simplifies deploying them. Active Directory users in particular will be impressed by how well this new release caters to their environment."

For more information about Symlabs Identity Management Products and Professional Services, please visit them on the web at http://symlabs.com.

SOURCE Symlabs, Inc.