In my previou post on spring security with LDAP, I had used a manager/admin user to authenticate a user.
You can use the following code to authenticate the user directly, without manager/admin user:
<ldap-server id="ldapServer" url="ldap://ldapserver:port"/>
<beans:bean id="bindAuthenticator" class="org.springframework.security.providers.ldap.authenticator.BindAuthenticator">
<beans:constructor-arg ref="ldapServer" />
<beans:property name="userDnPatterns">
<beans:list>
<beans:value>CN={0},ou=Users,dc=example,dc=com</beans:value>
</beans:list>
</beans:property>
</beans:bean>
