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

[Graham Ballantyne <grahamb@sfu.ca>]

As part of SFU's pending upgrade to ZCS7 I took a look at getting department names in the People Search. The good news is that it's fairly easy; department names are returned in the GAL search result so it just required a one-line mod to ZmPeopleAutocompleteListView.js (swapped title with department name as we don't care about the job title field). The bad news is that it's a mod to a core JS file, so it complicates your upgrade process.

Zimbra does support zimlets modifying the people search data through the onPeopleSearchData hook. This is how Raja got photos working in this bug fix: http://bugzilla.zimbra.com/show_bug.cgi?id=62966. Unfortunately, it isn't a perfect solution as-is; the zimlets only receive a subset of the full contact data; department name isn't included (they get full name, title, phone number and email address).

The good news is that it would be pretty easy for Zimbra to give zimlets full access to the full GAL search result object; between that and allowing zimlets to provide a custom template for the dropdown list, we could then pick and choose what attributes we want and shove them into the list.

I created an RFE with a patch (for 7.1.3) and an example zimlet: http://bugzilla.zimbra.com/show_bug.cgi?id=66410. Please feel free to vote for it and leave comments about how much this would mean to your institution ;)

Cheers,
Graham.

On 2011-08-30, at 16:23 , Steve Hillman wrote:
> 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




-- 
Graham Ballantyne
grahamb@sfu.ca

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