Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is a protocol designed to access directory systems over TCP/IP. Because of this various databases provide an LDAP interface such as Microsoft's Active Directory, Novell's eDirectory, as well as more dedicated LDAP solutions such as OpenLDAP.
Joomla! has had a native LDAP library (joomla.client.ldap (changed to JClientLDAP in Joomla 3.x)) and a native LDAP authentication plugin. This allows Joomla! to authenticate against LDAP systems out of the box: to configure, go to the Plugin Manager and enable and edit the Authentication - LDAP plugin.
You can also read a tutorial on getting started from scratch with LDAP.
Reference: http://docs.joomla.org/Glossary