Injecting Contacts to the OCS Address Book

I had a client ask recently if there was a way to insert federated contacts into their own internal address book. This would work out well for organizations where there would maybe be a few high-profile users who are frequently added between different companies. I went about trying this today and the answer is that it kind of works.

For sake of this example let’s say I’m user A in Company A with an OCS SIP domain of domainA.com and a partner I’m federated with is User B in Company B with an OCS SIP domain of domainB.com. Since the OCS Address Book Service will pick up any user or contact in Active Directory that has the msRTCSIP-PrimaryUserAddress attribute set I went about the following:

  1. Created a contact object for a User B in Company B as you would normally have for a user outside your organization.
  2. Used ADSIEdit and manually populated the attribute with the user@domainB.com value that I knew was reachable and federated through OCS already.
  3. Forced an Address Book Sync.
  4. Removed User B from my Outlook contacts so Communicator wouldn’t pick it up.
  5. Deleted the GALContacts.db file.
  6. Restarted Communicator.

I can search the Search field in Communicator and I get the by-letter matching for User B as I would expect for anyone else in my organization. The only downside is I don’t receive any presence or information for the user until I actually add them to my contact list. On the other hand, this is the exact same behavior seen when typing any federated contact’s name into the Search field. Mission sort of accomplished?

Peanut Gallery

  1. 1 Andrea

    Hi, I have the opposite problem. I would like that not the entire set of company contacts could be visible to all the employers. For example, I don’t want that the CEO’s state/presence could be visible by searching his name in the searching bar for all the employers. It’s possible to set different GAL or rule despite of the company role? Could you help me? Sorry for the off topic. Kind regards. Andrea

     
  2. 2 Tom Pacyk

    Absolutely. There is a Resource Kit tool available for download calls ABSConfig.exe which you can use to customize the address book. It can provide separate address books to groups of users based on their OU. So in your case you would probably want to create an OU for your management users.

    You might also want to have your management set their default access level to blocked or appear offline so nobody can contact them without them first adding the user.

     

Speak Up