In addition to the access control implementation, the PingDirectoryProxy Server includes a privilege subsystem that can also be used to control what users are allowed to do. The privilege subsystem works in conjunction with the access control subsystem so that privileged operations are only allowed if they are allowed by the access control configuration and the user has all of the necessary privileges.

Privileges can be used to grant normal users the ability to perform certain tasks that, in most other directories, would only be allowed for the root user. In fact, the capabilities extended to root users in the PingDirectoryProxy Server are all granted through privileges, so you can create a normal user account with the ability to perform some or all of the same actions as root users.

Administrators can also remove privileges from root users so that they are unable to perform certain types of operations. Multiple root users can be defined in the server with different sets of privileges so that the capabilities that they have are restricted to only the tasks that they need to be able to perform.