Understand the addressing behavior of DynamicSignature

You can now control the behaviour by setting the GetAllAddressFromUserOnly setting.

 

By default the DSClient will take the address and telephone information from the DSHQ account saving you the time to add address information to each and every user in you AD.

 

The following guide lines, assumes that you have less than 10 office addresses or there around.

 

Instead of having full address information on ALL user account, it is much easier to have your addresses store some place centrally.

 

And where should that be? We have chosen to store it in a Contact in AD. So, to minimize the administrative effort, the addresses used in your company needs to be created as Contact (or User Account) and be placed in a special OU. (Read more below)

 

All you need is to tag your users, by way of adding a short form notation in the Office Location field, and ONLY on users that DO NOT belong to the headquarter. You can of course mark up all users if you feel like it.

 

So, if you have 1.000 users sitting in one location, you just need to add 1 location address (Contact), and then mark-up your users.

 

Address Mark-up How-to

For each other location besides the Master HQ that the DSHQ Contact represents, create additional Contacts.

 

Follow this easy convention to use a short form of the address.  If the address is “46 Harold Street” you would create a Contact called "46HS"

Do the same for all the other locations you have. Add the respective address information and telephone numbers etc. to these Contacts.

 

Now that you have created the addresses for your company, you need to indicate to what addresses all you users belong.

That is simply done by putting the short form (Contact name) in the Office location field of the users.

 

 

Here you can see "N6" has been added to the Office field of a user. So the DS Client will lookup that Contact and fetch address information from that.

 

In case the user has not been marked up, it will automatically default to the HQ address you created. This means that in reality you need not mark-up all the users that are sitting in you HQ building. You need only mark-up the users sitting elsewhere.

 

Notice: You CAN select many users and set the Office location field at once. Thus you can add addresses to a thousand users in a very short time.

 

 

 

If your company has much more then 10 addresses to handle, you may find the method inadequate. In that case you can setup the DSClient to pull ALL address info from AD instead.

 

Using Accounts instead of Contacts

If you create a User Account, and provide it with a mailbox, for addressing purposes instead of a Contact you can also use the 15 Custom Attributes that is available in the Exchange Pane of the User property.

 

OU Used for contacts

DS-Manager will create a default folder in the root of you domain, called "DSAddresses". Here it will place the DSHQ contact that is you default address, for all users, unless the "Office" field is populated with the name of another contact to use.
 

In later versions of DS you can move this folder away from the root as well as moving the DSHQ, since we updated AD access to use a search routine instead of a static lookup.


As of version 6.8.8 you can again confine the search to a specific OU. If you are in a large shared AD with other companies that also use DynamicSignature, but that are not connected to your organisation, you may want to the confine DS to not search the entire AD.

 

Let look at how to access a parameter not normally accessible.

 

If you go to C:\ProgramData\DynamicSignature\DS6\DSClient you find the configuration files.
In it look for:

OUForAddresses=DSAddresses

NameOfHQAccount=DSHQ

 

These are not visible in the Template Configuration toolbar in DS-Manager.


Due to backwards compatability if the value for OU is "DSAddresses" as is default, the entire AD will be searched for DSHQ. (Thus name is ignored)
 

If you want this to be confined, you can change this to something else, like DSContacts. That will be an indication you have specific requirements, and search will be confined.

 

OU inside OU need

If you want to have your contacts inside an OU inside another OU, you must construct the parameter to take into consideration the way it is place in the call.

So you have this structure:
 

Root |
        - FirstOU |
                      - SecondOU |
                                        - DSHQ
 

Then the parameter should be: FirstOU,OU=SecondOU

 

Internally DS is building a LDAP call based on a lookup of you root AD. It will be like this: ldap://OU=DSAddresses,DC=example,DC=com
 

You are replacing the DSAddresses and the OU prefix is already present. When you construct is inserted into the call it will be : ldap://OU=FirstOU,OU=SecondOU,DC=example,DC=com

 

That is a little quirky, but you get the gist of it.
 

Make it default for new templates

Note that the settings above is per template. If you want that every time you create a new template, you don't have to make this change, you can make the change in the master configuration that all templates inherits from.
"C:\ProgramData\DynamicSignature\DS6\Masters\Default.ini"