Multiple last name search in Jabber contacts

[Computerdude60]

We have users in Eastern Europe and it is common for them to have two last names in their profile. In jabber for Windows you can only find them using the first name entered in the field. For example say the last name is "Smith Jones" you can only find them by entering Smith, using Jones will not work. We are moving from Skype for business and with it you can search on either name and it find the user. 

Has anyone seen this "problem" and fond a way to modify the way Jabber searches for contacts?

Our environment is CUCM version 11.0.1 - Jabber 11.7 through Version 12.1

[Jonathan Schulenberg]

Are you using CDI or UDS as the contact source? If CDI Jabber should be leveraging AD ANR, allowing pretty much any partial match as long as the user supplied three characters. I believe UDS is a more basic starts-with type query.

[Anthony Holloway]

I did some research on ANR queries in Jabber a while back on version 11.5(2), and so I don't know if it's changed since then.  This also predates CDI, when EDI was king.  Regardless, I wanted to share some info on this, since I had it sitting on my laptop, and it wasn't doing anyone else any good there.

When searching the directory in Cisco Jabber, the application is hard coded to search AD for "ANR begins with", for your search string.

E.g., A search for "Hollow" finds my account (Anthony Holloway), because ANR has sn (Last Name) as an indexed attribute, and my last name does in fact begin with "Hollow". However, searching for "olloway" on the other hand does not find my account, because that would require a search on AD for "ANR contains", and that's not how it works.

Source: Active Directory: Ambiguous Name Resolution on TechNet

Therefore, if we would like a very-close-but-not-exactly-that-way user experience for "ANR contains", we would use AD attributes to our advantage and think about how users commonly look up records.

For example, if room names are colloquially known as "Everest", "Denali", "K2", etc., then we could keep the Display Name as the full name (E.g., "State-City-Conf-Name"), but leverage the Relative Distinguished Name (RDN) (as seen in the table above), for the common name.

Alternatively, in the article on ANR linked above, there is a section on adding additional attributes to ANR, and therefore you could use any attribute you want.

Jabber Logs showing the search is an "ANR begins with" query by nature of the syntax

[csf.person.adsource] [WriteLogMessage] - ConnectionManager::ExecuteQueryOnAllSearchers - Succeeded - Query string: [(&(objectCategory=person)(objectClass=user)(ANR=everest*))], Attributes: [cn]
[csf.person] [csf::person::PredictiveSearch::onRecordsFound] - (069CAE48) from source ActiveDirectory. search string everest. 1 record found.