Forum Discussion
Hide User from Skype for Business Online GAL - Possible?
Wanted to ask if its possible on O365 to hide users from Skype for Business Online on the resources that appear in address book / GAL search.
Why would I want to hide users?
Perhaps you have members of the organisation that you don’t want contacted by everybody else. Say if you have a strict communications policy that the CEO shouldn’t be directly contactable, you could hide them from appearing in the address book.
Let me know as currently in OnPrem you can but havent found articles about S4B Online
Loryan Strant Thank you for the response. it was just a scenario based question to make the point though. There are different scenarios we want to make sure we can use it for. The presence privacy mode option might work for what we are looking for.
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We had this problem. We cannot remove user accounts for compliance. We ended up creating an OU that was not synced to Office 365 and moving the user to the OU. It worked for us and was easier than any other option we found.
Well for my organization we have users that leave that we would not like listed in the GAL.
Within AD you can hide the account through "Attribute Editor" search for "msExchHideFromAddressLists" change the Value to "True" this would remove the user from the GAL and SFB. :)
But your way is also a right way.
Damone PierreSetting the "msExchHideFromAddressLists" attribute is also how we choose to hide users from the GAL. However, we use AAD Connect to sync AD to Office 365 and I have found that setting this attribute only hides contacts in Outlook. If users search for the 'hidden' user in S4B or while logged into Office 365, the 'hidden' accounts are still visible.
The 'hidden' accounts are converted to shared mailboxes so that old email can still be accessed so the option of configuring an OU that does not sync to the tenant is not an option for us. I am doing some more testing around this and will report back anything useful.
- The reasoning behind the request is a bit of a concern, as CEO's are not beyond reproach. Good leaders do not hide themselves from their employees.
In any case, focusing on the request at hand and the tech you have - if the same cmdlet or method you use on-prem doesn't work online then it's a no go. Online doesn't have 100% parity with Server.Loryan Strant Thank you for the response. it was just a scenario based question to make the point though. There are different scenarios we want to make sure we can use it for. The presence privacy mode option might work for what we are looking for.
