The DirConnect6 interoperability testing event was held at the Driskill Hotel, Austin, Tx, on Wednesday and Thursday June 21st and 22nd, 2000. It was a joint event of The Open Group and the Directory Interoperability Forum.

Participants were IBM (using an off-site server), Ingine, three groups from iPlanet, Iris, Microsoft, Novell, the Open LDAP Foundation, Utimaco, and The Open Group, who brought a snapshot version of the LDAP 2000 test suite.

Nearly everyone managed to connect to nearly everyone else, and execute nearly all the tests. The snapshot test suite ran more or less successfully against all servers except one.

All participants found the event valuable, although one company would have liked more tests in new technology areas. The most valuable feature is the ability to walk across the room and discuss the problem with the other guy in an environment where confidentiality is protected. (That is why there are no detailed result reports.)

For future events, one suggestion was to include remote participation via the Internet in future DirConnects. There were mixed views on this. There must be some kind of equivalent to the ability to walk across the room and discuss results - some kind of discussion forum. Currently, an implication of the way most companies'  firewalls work is that servers would have to be installed outside firewalls. This might lead to the event being swamped by non-participants if it lasted longer than a few days, unless some kind of event VPN were used. But these are not insoluble problems, and the feeling seemed to be that we should look at some kind of hybrid event with both on-site and off-site participation.