Sign in
Microsoft.com
 
Microsoft
 
 
 

locked
Display Name in the OCS client RRS feed

 > 

  • Question

  • Question
    Sign in to vote
    0
    Sign in to vote
    Hi all,

    I want to change the way contacts appear in OCS. I understand this comes from the AD display name attribute, however I do not want to change the AD attribute because of it being used elsewhere (such as Exchange).

    I see a SQL table that stores various strings in hex such as ADDisplayName, but changing it doesnt seem to have any effect.

    For example I might want "John Smith" to appear as "John Smith (xx366)" or whatever - I will script the update of the necessary data.

    Anyone know how I might accomplish this? I have tried changing the AdDisplayName column in the ResourceDirectory table and sign out/in of Communicator but it doesn't seem to have any effect.
    Monday, December 15, 2008 12:57 AM

All replies

  • Question
    Sign in to vote
    0
    Sign in to vote
    Hi,

    this info is pulled down from Active Directory so that would be the place for you to change that format. Why are you worried about Exchange? The naming convention you would apply might make sense for the address book view in Exchange as well ?

    Sincerely,
    Tonino Bruno
    Tonino Bruno
    Tuesday, December 16, 2008 8:58 PM
  • Question
    Sign in to vote
    0
    Sign in to vote

    I don't believe there is any way to change that information without also changing it in the source.  Even if you do find a way to update the strings by manually changing data in the SQL database, the next time the ABS Regen process runs and see any changes in the AD objects it may very well resynchronize the original displayName value back into the SQL database, overwriting your change.

    The only way to accomplish this on a one-by-one basis would be to create Outlook contacts and then alter the Full Name field to appear as you want it, but that would be a poor solution for environemnts with more than a handful (<10) of users.

    Jeff Schertz, PointBridge | MVP | MCITP: Enterprise Messaging | MCTS: OCS
    Tuesday, December 16, 2008 9:42 PM
    Moderator
  • Question
    Sign in to vote
    0
    Sign in to vote
    thanks for the replies guys

    Tonino; yes I could live with the Exchange issue internally, but it also changes the way the sender's name appears on external emails, that I cannot live with.

    Jeff; ack on the AD re-sync issue, but I would be happy to just schedule a script to keep applying my changes, however this goes back to my original issue of changing the table data seemingly not having any effect, perhaps OCS caches the info once running, who knows? I have tried changing the hex values of AdDisplayName with no effect, I guess the inner workings of exactly how and when OCS and Communicator use this data is to remain a mystery.
    Tuesday, December 16, 2008 10:42 PM