At times, LDAP Administrator may be unable to load a schema from the server you communicate with. Usually this kind of problem occurs when the server does not grant the application access to the schema entry due to an ACL restriction for the user you are authenticated as; or when the server security policy does not allow the schema entry to be read unless the secure SSL protocol is used.

Many application components (the Entry Creation Wizard being a good example) require schema information for their proper functioning. So, as soon as LDAP Administrator detects that there is no server schema available, it uses a so called Default Schema instead. A default schema is a schema that consists of the standard, RFC-defined attribute types and object classes most of which are supported by all contemporary LDAP servers.

The default schema approach does not guarantee to relieve you of all kinds of possible problems associated with entry creation and other issues; however, in most cases it does manage to keep the application functionality working properly.

If you require working with schemaless servers on a regular basis, you will most probably want to customize the LDAP Administrator default schema. To do it, go to the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Softerra Shared\LDAP Administrator 3\Default Schema folder, which contains a set of files describing the default schema. Use your favorite text editor to add custom schema elements to it. But please note that we do not recommend you modify or remove the pre-defined schema items because it may result in an unexpected application behavior.