php applications on windows.

I was struggling to install gr8 php CMS tools under
our Windows servers. My special interest were
dokuwiki and joomla. First I thought to use VMWARE
and have Linux server hosted as virtual server.

Now as I am not in the server maintenance team (I
am in the CAD team) they felt jittery to have a Linux
maintenance to be done by them.

Then I searched for WAMP (Windows Apache MySQL PHP)
there were quite a few such tools available for Free.

WAMP, easyPHP XAMPP

are some I have tried.

All are equally good I deployed XAMPP. (Since we have cisco
physical firewall not much is needed to host XAMPP for intrAnet purpose.)

After XAMPP installing both dokuwiki and joomla was a cakewalk as
they are self installing once you dump the folder in the htdocs.

Now came the authentication using windows active directory.
Both dokuwiki and joomla have LDAP support out of box. But
I still had to struggle since I had no idea about the LDAP syntax.
A script sent by Rohan did help me know few things.

First issue:
php do not suport LDAP as default. In XAMPP you need to edit the php.conf
to activate the LDAP suport. Once this was done Dokuwiki setup was
up and running by doing small setting as per http://www.dokuwiki.org/auth:ldap_ad

Second issue:
There is some amount of joomal documentation available on the AD support
but this one did help me a bit
http://community.joomla.org/gsoc2009/lalitanand-dandge/908-joomla-ldap-authentications-plugin-window-2003-server-active-directory-configuration.html and
http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=473&t=264644&p=2233032#p2233032

Third issue:
Joomla need to have email address as mandatory and mapped correctly with the
active directory. Also it took me some time to figure out how to use
"search" and "User's DN" field in the LDAP plugin of joomla. So here is the
solution to it.
"Search" provides field to find your username in active directory
so I needed
empID = [search]
since employee ID is used as the username
"User's DN" is field where you can add suffix in your username so I use
[username]@mysubdomain.mydomain.com