This is an interesting question. I'm going to posit a guess that the
assistant field comes from a standard schema definition and is included in
AD as a result of that.
The DN field has many advantages, in that it is rename/move-safe, etc. One
other interesting point about this attribute is that it is not linked, which
means that you can't look at the backlink to see who supports who and such.
The majority of DN attributes in AD are linked, but this one is not.
I'm guessing the GAL doesn't use it because the GAL logic was either two
slow/too lazy to do the appropriate attribute scope query to resolve the DN
into a friendly name before publishing (no one wants to actually see the DN
in the GAL!). This may also just be a throwback from previous versions of
AD which didn't support ASQ, making this operation a little less elegant.
In any event, it would definitely make the GAL building logic slower as an
additional query would be required.
You could always automate this yourself by populating the assistant field
through some sort of provisioning process and then writing the free text
attributes based on data from the referenced object. You could then
implement some sort of change polling/sync process that would look for
changes to objects for the attributes you use for the free text value and
then set the value in the referencing object whenever the source value
changes. That would be slick. :) Unfortunately, this is less easy to do
than it might be due to the lack of the backlink.
Joe K.
----- Original Message -----
From: "AdamT" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <ActiveDir@mail.activedir.org>
Sent: Friday, July 14, 2006 9:12 AM
Subject: Re: [ActiveDir] ADSIEdit, Exchange and Assistants
Just looking further in to this, it seems telephoneAssistant and
secretary are the fields that appear in outlook - both of which are
free text input.
It begs the question of what the DN field of 'assistant' actually
does. Surely if it is expecting a distinguished name, it must be used
for something, somewhere?
Anyone know what?
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