Today at the office we had a situation that had never come up before. We recently created a new user, which has the same name as a very old user.

A particularly important group of users regularly send to the old user, using just his common name, example “guru”

Suddenly, these important users started getting the Ambiguous Name Dialog Box which I’m sure that they have never seen before, and I’m sure they hit enter, and the result is that the new user, who is listed first in the ambiguous name dialog box receives the email.

Important users complain, heads roll, management wants the new user’s name changed (even though his name follows our newly implemented naming convention).

I tried updating the location field in the person document so that the column in the dialog box could distinguish the two. No luck.

I’m basically finding that the Ambiguous Name Dialog Box is totally useless. The only columns that are ever present are for local address book entries.


UPDATE: I realized that the data shown in the columns in the ambiguous name dialog box comes from dc.nsf. We have dc.nsf configured on our servers, but we didn’t have the “LOCATION” field included in the dc.nsf configuration. I added that, and rebuilt the dircat and the locations field appears now in the dialog box!!! I figured this out purely by luck.


This should be customizable, otherwise, what is the point of trying to distinguish users, if you don’t give the person sending the message anything to distinguish the user by, other than full name??? Why show columns that can’t be populated.

If anybody knows how to populate the person document so that any distinguishable shows up in the ambiguous name dialog box, please let me know.

And by the was, we are using Notes 6.5.x client and server.

Posted by david, filed under Client config, Mail Routing, NAB. Date: July 9, 2008, 5:17 pm | 1 Comment »

One Response

  1. JYR Says:

    Hi David,

    You will have to migrate :-)

    Additional columns can be added to Ambiguous Names dialog and No Match dialog in Notes 7.0.2 and later

    http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=899&uid=swg21244505

    But not perfect…
    Additional columns do not appear in the Ambiguous Names dialog
    http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=899&uid=swg21264403

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