OK… this is somewhat more complicated than it used to be in Ex55 land! When you create a user in AD whatever full name (display name) you give it is apparently what will show up in the From field forever and ever no matter what you do – there’s nothing you can change in ADUC or, in fact, in ADSI that I could find that would alter this guy. Very annoying.
As such you need to create the Unity Messaging System account with the display name you want from the get go. There is a fairly easy way to do this but it does require a couple Unity restarts so you’ll have to plan ahead for this I’m afraid.
Step 1. Add a new registry key that tells Unity you want to use a different display name when creating the Unity messaging system account should it go missing – folks often delete that account without knowing what it is so there’s logic to create it on the fly at startup time if it’s not found. The key in question is under:
HKLM\Software\Active Voice\DOH\1.0\
The key is a string value you need to name “SystemMailboxDisplayName”. Stick in the name you want to appear in the “from” field for outside caller messages here.
Step 2. Shut down Unity
Step 3. Delete the Unity Messaging System account in Active Directory.
Step 4. Delete the Unity Messaging System account from SQL in the subscriber table – it’ll have an alias of “Unity_(server name)”. You can do this in SQL enterprise manager or you can use Query Builder from MS or use the query builder in CUDLE – you’d use “DELETE FROM Subscriber WHERE Alias=’Unity_(server name)’” in the query window for that.
Step 5. Delete the Messaging profile for the Unity messaging account – you’ll find this in KHEY_Users\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\windows Messaging System\Profiles\Unity System Profile. Just delete the entire branch. It’s sometimes easiest to find this by just searching the registry for “Unity System Profile” since there should be only one.
Step 6. Start Unity. This will recreate the profile, the account in AD and the SQL entry for the Unity messaging system account with the string you used above.
Step 7. Call in and leave a message for a subscriber as an outside caller. If you get the failsafe message (i.e. “I’m sorry, the system is temporarily unable to complete your call…”), restart Unity again – for reasons I’m not real clear on this sometimes is required here – probably due to timing issues. In my testing I had to do this 2 out of 3 times on my box. Regardless, after the 2nd restart it always works fine.
You should now see the “from” field as you wish.
I’m going to bang around in Microsoft’s archives for a bit and see if I can find where they hide that string they use there – I found other people on the newsgroups having the same problem but no definitive answers on what to do about it other than creating a new account (which is what they were told to do). If I find something, I’ll follow up out here.
