Forum Discussion
Hide User from Skype for Business Online GAL - Possible?
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.
Hi Bruce,
I found some suggestion that this may be due to having disabled the AD accounts prior to setting the "msExchHideFromAddressLists" attribute. I tested reversing that order but it made no difference, the 'hidden' accounts are still visible when searching via Skype or Outlook web.
Still needing a solution to this on our end so I'll update this if I find anything.
Regards,
I finally found a solution to this issue so hopefully this will assist others. Overview of our environment:
- Email in Office 365 tenant (migrated from on prem Exchange 2010)
- Setting the AD attribute 'msExchHideFromAddressList' to TRUE resulted in the mailbox being hidden from the GAL when using Outlook client but NOT when viewed in Web mail or Skype
- Requirement was to keep shared mailboxes in Office 365 (eg: could not simply stop synchronizing these users) for archive purposes but prevent those mailboxes from appearing when searching the GAL
I ended up doing some 'stare and compare' between users that were successfully hidden from the GAL everywhere and those that were not, it quickly became apparent the accounts that were originally created in Exchange and migrated to 365 were the accounts successfully being hidden from the GAL. I compared all AD attributes between a couple of accounts and found the users created after the migration did not have the 'mailNickname' attribute set - this is due to the fact you can make an account work on the Office 365 tenant by simply setting the 'proxyAddresses' attribute which is how all newer mailboxes had been commissioned.
Confirmed after manually setting the 'mailNickname' attribute and doing "start-adsyncsynccylce -Policytype Initial" the mailboxes were hidden from the GAL across the board.
Trying to implement this myself and am a bit Skype-ignorant. I assume there is some sort of lag between this attribute being synced to AzureAD and population of the SfB Online/Exchange Online GAL and any Offline Address list. Is this the case? How long should I wait for this to come into effect in my SfB Client?
So here is my issue for hiding users from Skype which none of these actually work.
I have 7000 mail contacts that we sync from a partner organization where I want them
to show in the GAL but not Skype
Michael Thompson - That is outside the realm of what was being discussed in this thread so I'd suggest starting a new conversation. You may investigate synchronizing your external mail contacts to a separate address book that is available to all Outlook users.
Regards,
Benn
