Allowing users to update their Personal Details

[brah]

Allowing users to update their Personal Details

Hello all,

I need to allow users to update their personal details i.e. department / telephone number / contact details. I also need to ensure that a user is not able to update another users details. Does anyone know how to do this.

Basically it is the General tab in the users account on Exchange Administrator that I need the users to be able to update.

Any responses would be greatly appreciated.

Regards
Brian

 

[Zekske]

It's not possible on exchange 5.5. You will have to upgrade to version 200x.

regards

 

[zbnet]

Brian, you should have linked the threads together... thread10-105040

 

[allanrxx]

I know the Galmod tool will allow users to update address, phone, etc info, but is there any way to allow a user to update other fields? Specifically, I want a user to be able to add a SMTP address('Internet Address' in Exchange) to their information. Any way to do that by Galmod or by custom scripts?

Thanks in advance.

 

[zbnet]

Wow, I've never come across that request before: think of the havoc that could cause. Most places like to control the email addresses they use.

I suppose the answer to your question is yes, a custom script could do that... after all, it's just a directory value, same as the names or address fields are (okay, I know it's part of a multi-value field, but that's a minor distinction).

 

[allanrxx]

I know it's an odd request....but we do need users to be able to add an address from one particular external domain.

Can you point me in the right direction to start coming up with a script. Do I use CDO somehow? Or something else? I do web development in asp/vbscript, so I'm fairly comfortable connecting to sql/acess/mysql databases, but I know very little about Exchange so far and even less about manipulating the data in the Exchange database. And on that note, how is exchange data stored.....in some kind of proprietary format?

Thanks for the reply.

 

[xmsre]

"Specifically, I want a user to be able to add a SMTP address('Internet Address' in Exchange) to their information."

That, my friend, is a recipe for disaster. So exacly how many new helpdesk personnel did you plan on hiring anyway?

Can it be done? Sure; you would modify the proxyaddresses attribute. Should it be done? Absolutely not.

 

[weshot]

people can update their personal information (pager, cell phone, favriote song ...etc) in their signature.

from admin stand point, you'll never want the end user to update those on server directory by themselves--> engineer claim as manager ?
especially the display name and smtp address or alias, it's more appropriate have admin or assistant admin manage those updates.

even a small typo on the address could be disater, big no NO

 

[xmsre]

I can just see it now; L-user adds their AOL address to their smtp addresses then calls the helpdesk because their AOL mail isn't coming into exchange server. a-spammer adds their spam-o-matic.nuisance address.....

 

[allanrxx]

I think maybe my plans were misunderstood.... I do not plan to let users wildly add random email addresses from random domains to their list of smtp addresses.

Say my users are user1@abc.com, user2@abc.com, and user3@abc.com. Now suppose I have my VERIFIED, VALID smtp addresses that I want to add...user1@xyz.com, user2@xyz.com, and user3@xyz.com...one for each abc.com user.

I can collect all of the xyz.com addresses, clean/polish/sanitize/verify/validate/double-check them, and then associate them with a valid abc.com user. Basically, is there any way to automate the input process if I have a verified list of smtp addresses to add?

I thought that maybe I could do a directory export in Exchange, then add the extra smtp addresses to the exported csv file, and then re-import the directory. But if I do a directory export, it doesn't list multiple smtp addresses(for the users that have more than one address already) in the export....so it doesn't look like I can take that approach. Is there any way to automate a batch import of addresses?

Thanks,
Allan

 

[zbnet]

Ah, Allan, multiple email updates by you (the Admin) are an entirely different kettle of fish!

You can do what you want to do with Directory Import. The email addresses you see on the email addresses tab of a mailbox are broken out into two pseudo import/export fields: 'E-mail Addresses' and 'Secondary-Proxy-Addresses'. The two fields together make up the contents of the email addresses tab of the mailbox. By definition, because you can't have more than one primary proxy of the same address type, the 'E-mail Addresses' field (not to be confused with the 'E-mail Address' field, which belongs exclusively to a Custom Recipient) will contain only one address of each type, the bolded primary. (If you have more than one type of address defined, all the primaries will be in this field, separated by % by default) All other (non-bolded secondaries) will be in the 'Secondary-Proxy-Addresses' field, all separated by % (by default). If you have more than one secondary proxy for a type of email (say SMTP) then they'll all be there, and breaking them out can be a test of your Excel or scripting skills.

If the username bit of your email addresses isn't changing (just the domain bit), you could export the 'E-mail Addresses' field for your users, extract just the SMTP addresses from this (by Excel's Text to Columns command, or via a formula that searches for SMTP: and extracts the address, or via a perl script or similar), do a mass search and replace on your domain.com bit, and rename the column 'Secondary-Proxy-Addresses'.

When you import, make sure that the option for Multivalued Properties is set to Append (the default, I think), not Overwrite, otherwise you'll blat all your other secondary proxies! You can test the effect of your import by editing your import file down to just a single mailbox line to test the effects before you repeat for all the mailboxes.

 

[allanrxx]

Perfect! I tested this out and I think this is exactly what I need. Thank you very much for the reply.

One question....is there any way to filter which users are exported? Like if I just wanted to export one or a few users....I was just thinking that there may be certain instances where the admin may not want to export the entire directory. But I guess if the export process is fairly quick with large numbers of users, it might not be that big of a deal. I only have 10 users on my test Exchange machine but have close to 10,000 on the production servers so I don't have any way to test the speed in a test environment.

Thanks again for the help!

 

[zbnet]

You can limit the scope of the export by selecting the Recipients Container. Obviously the GAL get everyone (visible) in the organisation. If you have multiple sites, you can export just an individual Recipients Container.

Exporting 10K records isn't that big a job, especially if you don't include columns you don't need. Unless you want to be able to refer to the Display Name or other identifying fields for other reasons, there's nothing to stop you having just 3 fields in your header file: Obj-Class, and the two email fields.