What naming convention are you guys using for internal DLs?

[Jeff Harlow]

For years and several previous places of employment, we have always created internal DLs with the "_" underscore, so they were easy to find any the long list of names and groups.  At the place now, I simply cannot get it in the heads of our users they search for a group i.e. Sales and cannot find it, so they end up making their own lists in Outlook.  Of course, they later forget to add new employees and that becomes a problem IT has to continuly deal with.   Not sure why we cannot have multiple aliases to DL which would solve this issue.  So are you using underscores so they are at the top of the list or just names?

[#2]

Usually it's a prefix such as "DG" or "DL" or "Group", haven't seen anyone using just underscore yet.

[#3]

The company I currently work in constantly struggle to agree on a naming standard, largely due to Central IT not being able to mandate any sort of naming convention as satellite IT dept's simply wouldn't adhere to it.

Different countries, opinions, cultures etc - although we tried to gather everyones feedback and come up with a proposal every country / local IT Dept would agree on, it's been a challenge.

In summary though our proposal was :

DL's start with either a 'DG-' or simple a '-'

Groups / Teams start with 'Grp - '

Shared / Resource mailboxes start with a '$'

Thats the convention we're trying to get the business to adopt.

[#4]

Thanks for the responses. The problem we are facing is that users are not able to simply type in Sales in the To field, so they "assume" there is not a group. It is ridiculous to think users cannot remember this stuff no matter the number of times IT has trained and instructed them. But at the same time, why has Microsoft not made these fields a bit more user friendly and simply handle wildcard searches better.

Rather it is a underscore, a dash or a shorthanded DG or DL in front of the name, it renders the field useless when a user types in Sales and nothing comes up as the group is called DLSales or in my case _Sales. Even having multiple aliases on a DL/DG would help, that way we can have the best of both worlds. Have DL so they are easy to find for those that know how to use an address book and then have Sales for those that are determine just to type it in... The challenges we face in IT.