The Description Property

The Description property determines the name of the attribute or class as used by the LDAP protocol. In fact, in the schema documentation (see About the Directory Schema, Directory Schema Contents, and Obtaining Attribute Information), the Description property is referred to as "LDAPName."

If you are using the Microsoft Exchange Server Administrator program to view the attributes in the schema, you see the Description property displayed under the name "Description."

For example, the schema documentation for the Address-Home attribute shows that this attribute's LDAPName is homePostalAddress. If you use the Administrator program (in raw mode) to view the property page for the Address-Home attribute, you see the value homePostalAddress by clicking Description in the Object attributes list box.

Caution  Changing the LDAP name of an attribute can cause interoperability problems. However, reading the value of the LDAP name can be useful for an application that, for example, uses LDAP to present a "white pages"-style compendium of information. In this case, it must know the LDAP names of attributes to be able to read them for the purpose of responding to queries for user data.