Re: [ActiveDir] ADSIEdit, Exchange and Assistants
Just looking further in to this, it seems telephoneAssistant and secretary are the fields that appear in outlook - both of which are free text input. It begs the question of what the DN field of 'assistant' actually does. Surely if it is expecting a distinguished name, it must be used for something, somewhere? Anyone know what? On 13/07/06, AdamT [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Nevermind - figured it out myself after finding an account with N/A in the field- the correct field is called 'telephoneAssistant', and is a freetext input, rather than a DN. On 13/07/06, AdamT [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Dear font of all knowledge, I remeber reading a thread a while back about changing the value of the 'assistant' field, using ADSIEdit. Somebody's asked me to do this today, so I've given it a go, and copied/pasted the DN from one user to the other's 'assistant' field - but the change doesn't appear to be showing in people's Outlook clients. I've checked on a freshly installed Outlook client, just to be sure there's no cached data, and looking at the user's GAL properties still shows the assistant field as blank. Am I missing something here? Is that not the same assistant field that Exchange 2K/2K3 would be looking at? Is there something else I need to do to enable usage of this field? Thanks in advance, -- AdamT If it truly were the thought that counted, more women would be pregnant - anon -- AdamT A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything. - Nietzsche List info : http://www.activedir.org/List.aspx List FAQ: http://www.activedir.org/ListFAQ.aspx List archive: http://www.activedir.org/ml/threads.aspx
Re: [ActiveDir] ADSIEdit, Exchange and Assistants
This is an interesting question. I'm going to posit a guess that the assistant field comes from a standard schema definition and is included in AD as a result of that. The DN field has many advantages, in that it is rename/move-safe, etc. One other interesting point about this attribute is that it is not linked, which means that you can't look at the backlink to see who supports who and such. The majority of DN attributes in AD are linked, but this one is not. I'm guessing the GAL doesn't use it because the GAL logic was either two slow/too lazy to do the appropriate attribute scope query to resolve the DN into a friendly name before publishing (no one wants to actually see the DN in the GAL!). This may also just be a throwback from previous versions of AD which didn't support ASQ, making this operation a little less elegant. In any event, it would definitely make the GAL building logic slower as an additional query would be required. You could always automate this yourself by populating the assistant field through some sort of provisioning process and then writing the free text attributes based on data from the referenced object. You could then implement some sort of change polling/sync process that would look for changes to objects for the attributes you use for the free text value and then set the value in the referencing object whenever the source value changes. That would be slick. :) Unfortunately, this is less easy to do than it might be due to the lack of the backlink. Joe K. - Original Message - From: AdamT [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: ActiveDir@mail.activedir.org Sent: Friday, July 14, 2006 9:12 AM Subject: Re: [ActiveDir] ADSIEdit, Exchange and Assistants Just looking further in to this, it seems telephoneAssistant and secretary are the fields that appear in outlook - both of which are free text input. It begs the question of what the DN field of 'assistant' actually does. Surely if it is expecting a distinguished name, it must be used for something, somewhere? Anyone know what? List info : http://www.activedir.org/List.aspx List FAQ: http://www.activedir.org/ListFAQ.aspx List archive: http://www.activedir.org/ml/threads.aspx
[ActiveDir] ADSIEdit, Exchange and Assistants
Dear font of all knowledge, I remeber reading a thread a while back about changing the value of the 'assistant' field, using ADSIEdit. Somebody's asked me to do this today, so I've given it a go, and copied/pasted the DN from one user to the other's 'assistant' field - but the change doesn't appear to be showing in people's Outlook clients. I've checked on a freshly installed Outlook client, just to be sure there's no cached data, and looking at the user's GAL properties still shows the assistant field as blank. Am I missing something here? Is that not the same assistant field that Exchange 2K/2K3 would be looking at? Is there something else I need to do to enable usage of this field? Thanks in advance, -- AdamT If it truly were the thought that counted, more women would be pregnant - anon List info : http://www.activedir.org/List.aspx List FAQ: http://www.activedir.org/ListFAQ.aspx List archive: http://www.activedir.org/ml/threads.aspx
Re: [ActiveDir] ADSIEdit, Exchange and Assistants
Nevermind - figured it out myself after finding an account with N/A in the field- the correct field is called 'telephoneAssistant', and is a freetext input, rather than a DN. On 13/07/06, AdamT [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Dear font of all knowledge, I remeber reading a thread a while back about changing the value of the 'assistant' field, using ADSIEdit. Somebody's asked me to do this today, so I've given it a go, and copied/pasted the DN from one user to the other's 'assistant' field - but the change doesn't appear to be showing in people's Outlook clients. I've checked on a freshly installed Outlook client, just to be sure there's no cached data, and looking at the user's GAL properties still shows the assistant field as blank. Am I missing something here? Is that not the same assistant field that Exchange 2K/2K3 would be looking at? Is there something else I need to do to enable usage of this field? Thanks in advance, -- AdamT If it truly were the thought that counted, more women would be pregnant - anon List info : http://www.activedir.org/List.aspx List FAQ: http://www.activedir.org/ListFAQ.aspx List archive: http://www.activedir.org/ml/threads.aspx
