Other than being used for access by other protocols such as pop, imap, and owa, last I checked it's also the value used for the x.400 like address which is used for mail delivery internally by Exchange. You wouldn't want that to be non-unique else you might have to call somebody like joe to come in and help clean up :)
I'm surprised that this company you're at has not gone to unique values for this. I'm equally surprised they don't have other issues with their Exchange deployment, but it's possible you haven't gotten far enough into it yet to notice some of them. I've blogged about my thoughts regarding what should be globally unique in an AD/Exchange environment. It's a long enough blog it may even be a good candidate for an essay or possibly a sleep aid. If you want the details, have a read. The short answer is that you want every user to be unique and to have a consistent and trouble-free experience. That keeps you from being up late at night with international customers first and your local in-country customers the next day. Mailnickname is one of the attributes that should be unique same as samaccountname and smtp address (some are enforced per forest, some per domain but all should be enforced regardless in my opinion). Since they can often feed on one another, I maintan that samaccountname should be the user's foundational, non-changing, never touched as long as that person is a member of the company in good standing, network id. Exchange relies on Active Directory and as such you're better following the same rules . Al On 11/22/06, joe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
The mailnickname isn't populated in a similar way to display name. The common ways for mailnickname generation and its population are through the RUS, by CDOEXM, or by the special ADUC extension (and no ADUC doesn't use CDOEXM). This is unlike displayname which has ADUC as its common way to be populated. Certainly they could have done something like that but they didn't. Changing the format is ok, most companies don't do it but some do. But if there is going to be a change, change to something that is guaranteed to be unique in your organization. Display names are very often not unique; definitely not unique at scale which is why Al said, it don't scale.... Go to any larger company in the US and type in Smith, Jones, Brown, or Johnson in the GAL and you will likely see multiple Alan's, Andrew's, Amy's, Bob's, Carol's, Fred's, John's, Steve's, etc... If you are multi-national try Chang, Chen, Gupta, Singh, Lopez, Hernandez, Jannsen, Smit, Larsen, Berg, Schulz, or Schmidt. The attribute is used quite a bit in Exchange. Where all it is used I will let some Exchange person respond if they want, but look quickly at a mailbox enabled user and check how many times you see the value. Note that none of the other attributes that use mailNickname in their initial generation will change if you change mailnickname, you absolutely wouldn't want that or else it would break certain types of delivery for that user. I have seen some nasty issues in larger orgs that resulted in mailNicknames not being unique. The problems can be solved by mechanisms other than unique mailNicknames but unique mailNicknames is by far the easiest way to handle it. I have a tool that reports bad Exchange attribute settings in an Org and duplicate mailNickname is one of them that I flag as fairly high priority due to my experiences. joe -- O'Reilly Active Directory Third Edition - http://www.joeware.net/win/ad3e.htm -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Tom Kern Sent: Tuesday, November 21, 2006 10:07 PM To: ActiveDir@mail.activedir.org Subject: Re: [ActiveDir] mailNickName(OT) well, the company i currently work for sets the mailNickName of all users to "firstname.lastname". I didnt know there was any issue with changing the format of that attribute. we have around 110,000 users mixed between Exchange and Lotus Domino and this is the format they have been using(why, i'm not sure, I just started here) I thought there could be a way to change the default format of the mailNickName attribute the same way you could change the format of the displayname. What issues can arise by changing the mailNickname format. I mean, what is this attibute for used exactly? I thought this was only used for POP3 and IMAP and maybe OWA and ADC. And I didnt think changing it could affect anything. Can you guys educate me, please? Thanks On 11/21/06, joe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Not that I am aware of. > > I am with Al on this, keep it as the sAMAccountName. This value while isn't > enforced to be unique really should be. Using sAMAccountName helps with that > though it still allows duplicates in different domains. > > joe > > -- > O'Reilly Active Directory Third Edition - > http://www.joeware.net/win/ad3e.htm > > > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Tom Kern > Sent: Tuesday, November 21, 2006 5:19 AM > To: activedirectory > Subject: [ActiveDir] mailNickName(OT) > > Is there anyway to change the format of the mailNickName attibute to > be something other than sAMAccountName automatically? > Is there something like a "display specifiers" change that could > change the format during the automatic generation of it to be > "firstname.lastname" or can this only be scripted? > > Thanks > List info : http://www.activedir.org/List.aspx > List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/ListFAQ.aspx > List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir@mail.activedir.org/ > > List info : http://www.activedir.org/List.aspx > List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/ListFAQ.aspx > List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir@mail.activedir.org/ > List info : http://www.activedir.org/List.aspx List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/ListFAQ.aspx List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir@mail.activedir.org/ List info : http://www.activedir.org/List.aspx List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/ListFAQ.aspx List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir@mail.activedir.org/
