Changing Extension Number Number Reference Attribute in AD

[jeremyts]

Hi,

We have a couple of large customers that cannot change the Telephone Number (telephoneNumber) field in AD to represent their extension number. It MUST be their full number, including country code, etc. This is because the phone number field is exported from SAP, and published globally on their corporate address list.

If we change this information in Unity after importing the user, it will synchonise with AD and change it there, which will be out of sync with the info in SAP.

So I am trying to find an alternative solution.

Can this be changed to reference the ipPhone attribute instead of telephoneNumber attribute?

How does everyone else deal with this in a UM scenario?

Cheers,

Jeremy.

[jeremyts]

Reading the Cisco Unity Data and the Directory white paper I have noticed that the Extension is stored in the ciscoEcsbuDtmfID attribute.

So does this mean that the synchronization from Unity to AD will not overwrite the telephoneNumber attribute?

If not, then I can put my mind to rest. However, it would be nice if the Bulk Import Tool can be changed to allow the extension number to be referenced from a different attribute.

Otherwise this becomes a very combersome process when importing many users. Because every one of them needs to be modified after they have been imported.

Cheers,

Jeremy.

[lindborg]

Unity never touches the phone number field in AD (any of them - business phone or otherwise), we use the custom attribute to store the primary extension for the very reason you are concerned about - we need to enforce unqiueness and share the extension with other Unity servers but folks don't necessarily want us writing over these fields so we don't.

I believe there was an update to the CUBI tool that would allow you to strip the X most left digits off the business phone field when importing - I believe the version that shipped with 4.0(4) supports this.

[jeremyts]

Thanks. That's good to know.

The issue with the CUBI tool is that it won't import a user with non-DTMF digits in the phone number field. ie. +(). For example: (+61 8) 9220 4000. And this is what I cannot change. So it is not getting past the first step.

The second issue is that the last 4 digits of their particular number doesn't necessarily represent their extension number. I can get SAP to export their actual extension number and place it in the IP Phone attribute. So then I just need the CUBI tool to reference that instead.

Cheers,

Jeremy.