When you have your own LDAP or Active Directory repository, you can configure your community to integrate with it.
You can use LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol), including Active Directory, for authenticating users. A standard for user authentication and for storing user profile data, LDAP is a powerful tool for large organizations (or organizations integrating many applications) to simplify user account management.
By default, the application doesn't use LDAP. Instead, it stores all user data in a database and performs authentication with that data. When you select LDAP instead as the authentication system, you're asking that the application authenticate against your LDAP server. During setup, you specify which users and groups from LDAP you want the application to use (although you needn't use groups defined in LDAP). Jive SBS will query your LDAP server to ensure that users and groups (if you want) are nominally represented in the application database (so that users can be associated with content), but will authenticate against your LDAP server.
This section will guide you through configuring the application to use your LDAP server for authentication. These instructions assume that you're a competent LDAP administrator and that you're familiar with the admin console. Any LDAP-compliant server should work, including Active Directory.