Re: Showing Department and Other Info in People Search and Autocomplete

[Steve Hillman <hillman@sfu.ca>]

Hi Matt,
  Since you singled out SFU, I thought I better respond :)

We did do a hack to the autocomplete code back in version 5.x that pulled the department name from the GAL, but it completely broke in version 6. We fought with it for quite awhile before finally deciding to give up on it. Our workaround was to remove all students from the GAL to avoid that confusion. It still doesn't completely prevent the problem if you have two John Smiths on staff, but at least you don't get confidential info being emailed to a student.

We haven't deployed version 7 yet but are targeting Christmas to have it out. We'll be looking at getting departments to show up in the People Search (I just checked and phone numbers show up there but not departments). I'll let you know if we have any success.

There's been a long standing RFE to allow the auto-complete dropbox be configurable re: what info is displayed. It would have been easy in v5 but v6 re-engineered how the autocomplete works and probably made it a lot more difficult. I'd be surprised if it ever gets addressed (sadly -- I think almost every university would find it valuable)

If you want to vote it up, it's here: http://bugzilla.zimbra.com/show_bug.cgi?id=27362


----- Original Message -----
> Hi,
> 
> We're running 7.1.1.
> 
> A regular problem for us here is having people misaddress a message
> because we have a John Smith as Provost and and John Smith as a
> student. Their names appear the same in the GAL even though they are
> different people with different email addresses. This can be an issue
> since senders sometimes don't pay attention to who they're actually
> sending to.
> 
> I thought that loading a persons department in the OU attribute in
> Zimbra would cause it to appear when using People Search or during an
> Autocomplete action, but that does not seem to be the case. Can anyone
> else confirm that? Or has anyone figured out how to make it work so
> that it's easy to identify who an individual is through the People
> Search or Autocomplete actions?
> 
> There used to be a hack (that we might have gotten from SFU) that
> allowed us to show extra info in the Autocomplete lookups, but I think
> it stopped working after an earlier upgrade pre-7.1.
> 
> Thanks,
> Matt

-- 
Steve Hillman                                IT Architect
hillman@sfu.ca                               IT Infrastructure
778-782-3960                                 Simon Fraser University