How to install Delegated Administrator 4.5 into an existing directory.

Question

I have installed iDA 4.5 in a test environment and found that it works beautifully for what I need it to do. The problem that I have is that our existing directory is so different from the one used by iDA that I have no idea how to successfully make our directory "manageable" with iDA.
The installation of iDA wants to create a new organization upon installation (like o=isp). I have made a test copy of our directory on a new server and have tried to point to our organization (o=mmi). When I do this it says:
"This suffix is not an iDA Entry. iDA can't manage it."
If I select another suffix like o=isp, it installs just fine, but obviously all of our user and group information cannot be managed.
Our directory structure is also significantly different than what iDA expects. When you create a new organization in iDA, it automatically uses an ou=People and ou=Groups for storing that information. Our existing directory starts at o=mmi as the root and then has a number of ou's for different geographical locations (such as ou=utah). Then the users and groups are in that OU (no sub-OU of People or Groups). If I can get iDA to install in o=mmi, I still have to make it understand that all users and groups belong in that ou.
Does anyone have any experience or better documentation in getting this to work with an existing directory. It looks like it's going to be a lot of work, but I believe it will be worth it if I can get to the type of web administration that I saw while evaluating the product.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I had such a problem, once, I learned shell scripting, awk and then perl to solve this problem.
The way you have your users structured was the old policy, when people started to use LDAP (or X500) this was the most obvious way of doing things. Now, we know that APPLICATIONS need to read the ldap structure, not people so, I would use a 2 steps (and several monthes) aproach:
Now you have an OU=NY with all the people that work in New York, create a group called New_york and, put all the NY peole in the ou=people and, put a reference to the user in the New_your group.
The best way of doing this is exporting all your user DB to an ldif file, making your scripts and, go for it.
Test everything and, then, start to change your structure again to put it in the iDA format. this way, not only you get the advantages of iDA but, you also get a better ldap structure and, possibly, much faster.
It took me something like 2 monthes of work to do that, whithout stoping my regular work because of that (30 - 60 minutes per day). If you have a very big structure, do a tar of your Directory files to another machine and, work there. Just be carefull with the changed passwords.
Hope this helps