OCS and CUPS – the username quandary part 2

Since I lasted posted on the subject, I’ve come up with what I think are all the possibilities.

1. You can change the users SIP ID to match their AD account name. This makes it so that:
   1. NT Account name is domainjimsmith
   2. SMTP Address is jsmith@domain.com
   3. SIP ID is jimsmith@domain.com
   4. CallManager userID is jimsmith

Under this scenario, RCC works and Communicator works. The problem now is that Outlook and Sharepoint now don’t have any presence information. The reason is that Outlook and Sharepoint both query the "e-mail address" field in AD (which is the address that is set to "primary SMTP address". So to fix it you can do the following:

1. Set up an SMTP alias for jimsmith@domain.com and make it the primary SMTP address.
   1. NT Account name is domainjimsmith
   2. SMTP primary Address is jimsmith@domain.com
   3. SMTP secondary Address is jsmith@domain.com
   4. SIP ID is jimsmith@domain.com
   5. CallManager userID is jimsmith

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Under this scenario, RCC works, Communicator works and you are integrating CCM with AD. HOWEVER this causes any messages that the user sends out to be stamped with this new e-mail address as the reply-to. This isn’t a huge deal because they continue to receive messages sent to either address, but it could be a political problem. People generally don’t like to have multiple e-mail addresses floating around out there. If you can swing the politics of it, this will solve your problems altogether. If you can’t then you are left with a few alternatives:

1. You can change the users SIP ID to match their AD account name. This makes it so that:
   1. NT Account name is domainjimsmith
   2. SMTP Address is jsmith@domain.com
   3. SIP ID is jimsmith@domain.com
   4. CallManager userID is jimsmith
   5. Now hack the registry so that outlook will query the SIP attribute in AD instead of the STMP address.

Under this scenario, RCC works, Communicator works and you are integrating CCM with AD. HOWEVER sharepoint presence is still broken. If you can live with that, and live with having to tweak everyone’s registry, then this might do it for you. If not, then you are left with only 1 alternative:

1. Leave the SIP ID alone and don’t integrate CCM with AD
   1. NT Account name is domainjimsmith
   2. SMTP Address is jsmith@domain.com
   3. SIP ID is jsmith@domain.com
   4. CallManager userID is jsmith

Under this scenario, RCC works, Communicator works, outlook works, sharepoint works, and you don’t have to fool with people’s primary SMTP addresses. But, you don’t have synchronization between AD and CCM. And people wishing to access the CCMuser pages need to log in with a different account than their NT account.

Lastly, and potentially most interestingly, someone posted a comment on my blog about using the CCM-AD integration and not keying off SAMAccount name, but rather e-mail address. The comment says that you can use the e-mail address field to populate the callmanager usernames. I had a friend test this out in a lab and he said that when he did that it brough over the whole e-mail alias (jsmith@domain.com) rather than just "jsmith". This would cause a few wacky issues which I wasn’t in the mood to tackle.

I didn’t pursue this option, but you may want to give it a shot. If anyone tries/has done it, post a comment with details. Thanks!