We currently have the asstistant field (relational) maintained in AD. There is an asistant field (string) in exchange. People would like to be able to view the assistant information in the exchange address book. Has anyone synced these 2 fields?

Are you sure they're not the same attribute?My Book - Active Directory, 4th Edition My Blog - www.briandesmond.com

Exchange uses AD so, unless you have a different forest for Exchange, there is no need to sync anything. Usually fields in the GAL have different display names to the underlying field in AD. The easiest thing is to populate the attribute through Exchange and then inspect it using ADSIedit - then you'll get the AD system name of the field you just updated. This will be useful if you do then need to sync the data to another AD forest. http://www.wapshere.com/missmiis

the assistant attribute is what is used by ad and the attribute msExchAssistantName is what exchange uses. Assistant is a relational attribute - which is good if the assistant changes info it is dynamic link - while msExchAssistantName is a string variable.

It used to be possible to do relational to string flows with the sync service, but they broke (ahem "fixed") that in FIM so it's trickier than it used to be. Where is the assistant coming from originally? Is it maintained directly in AD or is it flowing from somewhere else? http://www.wapshere.com/missmiis

Hi Betsy, If you need to convert attribute values i would suggest that you import the relational attribute to a string attribute in FIM sync ma and service. You can do this by using customexpression - IIF(IsPresent(Assistant),Assistant,Null()) in the import from AD sync rule then you will get the assistant name as a string in FIM and you can send it to other datasources as a string. I've done this were i need to gather manager (relational) and send information to other systems that require manager name (string). //Christian www.cortego.se

Thanks all - you think they would make this easier.