Reformatting Display Name Values in your Destination or Source (Normalization Sync)

With multiple directories in your environment, you may run into situations where the Display Name format is different between directories (i.e., one directory uses a format of ‘First Last’ while another directory uses a format of ‘Last, First’). Or you may have a single directory in which the Display Name of all objects is inconsistent.

Syncing between two directories:

In a typical connection between two directories you may wish to reformat the Display Name that appears in your synced Destination contacts. To do this, select the desired Reformat Display Name Option (on the Display Name tab). When the Sync runs, your synced Destination contacts will have their Display Names reformatted to match the selected format.

Normalizing the Display Name on a single Source directory:

You may have a single LDAP directory in which the Display Name of objects are inconsistent (i.e., some are ‘First Last’ while others are ‘Last, First’). In this case, you may wish to normalize the attribute data so all Display Names appear in the same format.

Note: Be very careful with this type of connection. Your Source and Destination of this connection are the same, so you are overwriting your primary directory. If you do not configure this properly, there is no undo function. It is highly recommended you run a Simulation only (with the Sync disabled) with a Log File level 3-Detailed (on the General tab) and then review the Simulation log’s Dest Entry’s to determine if your results are as desired before running an actual Sync to update your Display names.

To do this, you configure the Sync/Join Mode to Join Only. The unique element of this connection is that the Source and Destination directories specified will be the same.

1. Create a connection as usual. On the Source and Destination tabs, specify the exact same IP/login info for the directory where you want to normalize display names

2. On the Source tab, select the desired Object Types you’d like to pull.

3. On the Display name tab, select the desired Reformat option.
   i.e.
   ^sn^, ^givenname^ (^company^) 1 . (Optional) If the source data does not include First/Last, you can elect to parse this information from the Displayname. If you specify Parse=YES, UnitySync will break the original Display Name attribute into its component parts (First, Initials, Last) and use those values to rebuild the Display Name into the desired format. (Default) If you specify Parse=NO, UnitySync will use the actual First Name, Initials, and Last Name attributes to build the new display name.

4. On the Destination tab, you must enable the Join Only mode to utilize Join with Existing Objects functionality. To do this, you must specify Join queries that are used to control the Join function. What attributes you chose depends on what Object Types you selected on the Source tab. If you are only using Object Type of Users, a good attribute to use for your queries is samaccountname.
   For example: (samaccountname=^samaccountname^)

5. On the Destination tab, specify a single value in the Modify Attributes parameter box. In Active Directory (AD) the attribute to specify is “displayname”.
   NOTE: The “Modify Attributes” setting is very important because you only want to modify the displayname attribute with this Sync run.

6. It is strongly you run a Discovery, SIMULATION and SYNC test with a SINGLE object.
   .
   On the Source tab, enter a source filter to pull a single object. I.e. Use the appropriate filter value to pull just one object. (note, if you are pulling Users AND Contacts, you should use a filter in each parameter.
   i.e.
   (mail=JoeSmith@domain.com)

7. Run Discovery and Simulation. Verify the Discovery and Sim log Dest Entry shows only a SINGLE object. And that the Displayname is the only attribute shown.

8. Run a Sync (of single object). Verify the change to the actual object. Is the Displayname updated as expected?

9. It is also strongly recommended you run a Discovery and SIMULATION on the full data.
   .
   Remove the filters and run a Discovery, Simulation. Verify the expected number of objects are discovered and Simulated and that the Dest Entry shows only displayname being changed.

10. Once satisfied with the various SIMULATION results, run Sync.

11. Verify the results of the Sync by checking the Displayname of the affected objects.