Hiding Mailboxes from Address List

[vcornett]

We are in the process of migrating users homed on an offsite Exchange server to a local Unified Messaging Exchange server. To avoid conflicts by appearing twice in the Global Address List, we hid their mailbox from the address list on the UM Exchange server. Now anyone who has their mailbox hidden from the address list does not show up in Unity's subscriber list. If we need to make changes, I have to unhide their mailbox and reimport them. We have run into some delays with getting cooperation from the offsite exchange administrators. Is it possilbe to keep the mailboxes hidden and still have them appear in Unity's subscriber list?<br><br>Thanks,<br><br>Vince<br><br>

[#2]

Unity 2.4.6 build 102 and later supports hidden users in Exchange. Versions prior to that did not pick them up.

2.4.6 requires you apply SP4 for Exchange 5.5 which provided a special flag we could pass in when doing searches via LDAP which returned hidden and visible objects alike. Before that Exchange would simply never return hidden objects when searching via LDAP.



Jeff Lindborg
Unity Product Architect/Answer Monkey
Cisco Systems
lindborg@cisco.com
http://www.AnswerMonkey.net (new page for Unity support tools and scripts)

[vcornett]

We are running 2.4.6.102 with Ex 5.5 and SP4. How do I enable 2.4.6 to pick up these hidden boxes?

[#4]

There's nothing you need to do to enable us to pick up hidden users in the directory. I'm testing it on one of my boxes here with 2.4.6 and it seems to work fine. I can import them, edit them in the SA etc... I'm not sure what's going on there. Anything else unusual about these boxes other than they're hidden from the address book?

Jeff Lindborg
Unity Product Architect/Answer Monkey
Cisco Systems
lindborg@cisco.com
http://www.AnswerMonkey.net (new page for Unity support tools and scripts)

[michele]

I work with vcornett as the Exchange Admin. These mailboxes are in sub-containers to Recipients on our Exchange server. Although I just now tried it with a mailbox in Recipients container and still can't see from Unity as a Subscriber. It can't be seen to be imported either so it is truly hidden. If I unhide the mailbox and re-synch Directory Services between Unity & Exchange server, this problem clears up.

[#6]

Hmmm.... well, if the containers were peers to the recipients container you'll need to hack the registry to make us look for users at the site level down instead of the recipients container down, but that doesn't seem to be the source of your problem since you can create users in the recipients container, mark them as hidden and still not see them for import.

Are you importing from the SA or the stand along bulk import utility? I'm testing with the SA import and I can't get this to fail on any of my test servers. If, after you see the user for import, can you then flag them as hidden and go back and they then don't show up for import?

Are you saying you have a mail user set up as a subscriber, it's working fine, but you hide it from the address book and then it stops showing up in the Unity SA at all (?!?). That would be very, very odd. We have lots of folks out there hiding users in the directory now and no reports of problems like this...


Jeff Lindborg
Unity Product Architect/Answer Monkey
Cisco Systems
lindborg@cisco.com
http://www.AnswerMonkey.net (new page for Unity support tools and scripts)

Edited by jlindborg on 4/23/01 10:42 AM.

[vcornett]

We have used both the bulk import and the SA import utility.
We have hidden both types of subscribers and neither appears in SA after the box is hidden.


We had all of our subscribers set up with mail and they appeared in the SA subscriber list correctly. All of our voice mail users currently connect to an offsite Exchange Server (that is nothing but an email server). In preparation of all the required tasks to make our UM exchange server the server they send and receive email through, we hid them from the address book. We then did a directory service update between the Unity Exchange and our UM Exchange server. At that point they disappeared from the subscribers list. Our exchange admin can supply a few more details, since I am really not exchange savy.

Thanks,
Vince

[vcornett]

I forgot to add we are running on W2K on both servers

[#9]

I have the same problem. All exchange servers are in one exchange site. The exchange site subscriber servers are all NT4-sp6a,X5.5-sp3+latest hotfix. The unity server is a W2k-sp1, x5.5-sp4, Unity 2.46.102. When I hid the mbx, they disappeared from the SA. They continue to function but, no longer show up on the SA.

schois

[#10]

We actually think we found this one...

There's a bug with updating where the flag for telling Unity to allow hidden users is not set. New installations of 2.4.6 will default to allowing this but upgrades wont. So if your system was upgraded from any version, try this procedure.

Go to the registry and head for:

HKLM\Software\ActiveVoice\Dalex\1.0\MailUsers

Under there you're looking for a key called "IncludeHiddenObjects" (no spaces) that should be set to 1. If you don't see the key, that's your problem. Create a new DWORD key with that name and set it's value to 1. The next time you restart Unity it should start showing you hidden users in the SA and hidden Exchange users for import.

There's a key by the same name under the "Distribution Lists" branch in Dalex\1.0 as well... if you want hidden DL support you'll need to set that key there as well.


Jeff Lindborg
Unity Product Architect/Answer Monkey
Cisco Systems
lindborg@cisco.com
http://www.AnswerMonkey.net (new page for Unity support tools and scripts)

[#11]

Yes, the key is missing. The DL key exist. Next reboot I'll verify results. thx

schois

[vcornett]

After we edited the registry to add this DWORD, hidden subscribers now appear in our Subscriber List. We did not reboot Unity (we probably will for good measure, but it appears that it might not be necessary).