Changing Subscriber mailbox name in unity database

[colin.mcnamara]

I want to do a bulk change of my unity subscribers mail box name's. If I edit the subscribers table, user alias field. Will that do the trick?

--Colin

[lindborg]

No, Unity treats the alias (mail nickname in 2Kx) as read only - we don't write changed to it back out to the directory. If you wish to change your alias names, you'll have to do it in AD (or EX55 depending on what your back end is) - Unity will read the changes from the directory back into SQL.

[colin.mcnamara]

Ok, so then if you want to bulk change subscribers mailbox names, and user objects that they are bound to you have to do that in AD then force a resync in unity ?

- for refence, I am going from a UM to a vm only deployment. I am trying to automate this as much as possible.

--Colin

[colin.mcnamara]

btw Jeff,

It always amazes me that the lead support engineer for unity is still involved with the user community. Your direct help, and the tools on answermonkey make my life much easier.

Thanks

--Colin McNamara

[lindborg]

If you want to change the alias and go from UM to VM, there's actually an easier way to go about this - The latest version of DiRt actually has an Alias mapping function built into it so you can do a restore of a Unity backup and force it to create new users with new aliases (or map to existing aliases in a new directory) - check out the help file for more details on this on its home page here:

http://www.ciscounitytools.com/App_DisasterRecoveryTools.htm

(I'm not "the" technical lead, by the way - I don't want to get in trouble here! There's a number of leads on the Unity project lines, I'm just one...)

[colin.mcnamara]

I thought one requirement for dirt is that I have to restore to a clean server...

I have 6 servers around the world I need to do this on.. would rather avoid the server if possible

--Colin

[colin.mcnamara]

I have found a slow, if not laborous process that works. I am manualy creating new accounts (vm-accounts, with the corrisponding mailboxes) then ising the migrate subscriber data tool to move all the users. Its slow.. but seems to work

--Colin

[lindborg]

Hmmm... yeah, doing it on a standing system like that, there's not another handy way to go about it. If you were moving into a different directory and you wanted to force the naming convention to be different on a new VM only install, DiRt would do it for you in one shot but changing it on the fly in a standing system, that wont work.