Best way?

[John Lederer <johnl@ibm.net>]

We are creating a LDAP directory that will be used to store contact information added by users.

The LDAP data will be extensively divided into groups so that users can look at subsets of the data, e.g. "customers" , "people connected with this matter", "my personal contacts".  We anticipate hundreds, perhaps even thousands of these groups, with wide variance in the number of members of groups, ranging from a handful to thousands.

The question is what are the plusses and minuses of using LDAP groups to store the group mebership information, or simply using an indexed multivalue field in which users can enter a groupname, such as the user's initials for personal groups, and filtering on that multivalue field.

I would appreciate comments about which of the two methods might work best in practice.

Regards,
John Lederer