Searching for groups in Jabber

[KimomaruNull]

My org is in the process of evaluating Jabber 12.5 (Cisco IM&P 12.5) as a possible replacement for Microsoft Skype for Business.  We have it running (UDS), and Jabber users are able to add Groups so that contacts can be dynamically maintained.  However, in order to add groups right now, the user has to go to File>New>Group and also know the exact name of the group (including case sensitive characters).  We can't seem to search for these groups in the same way as we search for users on the Jabber client.  How can we do this?  Searching for groups would go a long way toward making the decision for our org, it's a pretty big deal.

[Jaime Valencia]

You can't with UDS, that's the caveat with UDS, if you want to be able to search, you'll need to point to your LDAP directly.

[KimomaruNull]

That's unfortunate.  Feels like Cisco's missing a few "i"s and "t"s here.  So close.

[Jaime Valencia]

The feature is there, but you need to use LDAP to use it.

[KimomaruNull]

The feature is not there for UDS users, according to you.  So, it's not really there.  UDS has some bizarre drawbacks, like not being able to use profile pics from LDAP (as far as I know, this seems to be the consensus in every post I've read, and I would be happy to be wrong).

[Jaime Valencia]

No, you're not wrong, Jabber can only use one directory, it's either LDAP all the way, or UDS all the way.

If you choose UDS, then the pictures need to be hosted on a web server because even if they exist on LDAP, that field is not synced to CUCM, if you choose LDAP, they can be directly in LDAP or they can be on a web server.

As you have mentioned, UDS does have several drawbacks.

UDS is also a flat directory, so you cannot segment who your users can search for.