Nobody will answer my question - office 365

[TTW411]

My organization just switched to Office 365.  We have a global address book that holds contact for everyone in the organization.  I also have a personal address book with contacts.  Sometimes I have created a contact for someone in my organization so that I can keep their phone number and details that might not be in the global.  

I often send myself emails using my work email address so I have a contact for myself with just my work email address.  This contact has an alias (like "Superman") so that there's never ambiguity about what address I'm trying to get...makes things faster.

Now, here's the problem: when I edit a document on my organization's sharepoint site (or in Teams, or in the desktop app) Office 365 labels all my comments with this display name!  That is, instead of associating my comments with my network user account information (for example, Smith, John) it displays Superman!  And it's not just for me, my whole organization sees the comments as Superman.  

If I have a contact who appears in both the global and my contacts, Office 365 uses my contacts list as the display name (but doesn't show this to the world).  Meaning, I see their comments with their alias but they see their comments with their own name.

Short of deleting the contact, any thoughts on how to fix this?  In Outlook, the global address list is first.  So, if I've got two contacts with the same email address, why does Office use the display name

[#2]

@TTW411 anyone?  No ideas?  Is this forum dead?

[#3]

This is a fascinating topic! Everyone should join the discussion.

[#4]

"I often send myself emails using my work email address so I have a contact for myself with just my work email address."

Could you please explain why you are sending emails to yourself.

[#5]

Doesn't everyone? Well, there are a hundred reasons. I send myself emails so that I have a record of a meeting, so that I can remember to do something, I also cc myself a lot of emails so that I can track compliance with due dates. Imagine I need to remember to do something six months in the future - I'll send myself an email which I have a rule for that automatically assigns it a due date of today and puts it in my waiting folder. I then change the due date to the appropriate date. It gets the email out of my workflow (to do list) but will put it on my to do list when the time is right.

But that's beside the point. Is there a reason I can't have a record in my contacts for myself? For example, maybe I want to be able to send that contact card to people and it would have all my contact information in one place. Maybe I want to remember my anniversary.

Besides, it's not just me. Imagine I work with joe smith whose email address is on our company wide address list (global) as email address removed for privacy reasons. I keep forgetting Joe's information (his wife's name, where he went to school, etc.) so I keep a bunch of information on him in a contact card. But to separate that contact from the global one, I name him Idiot Smith. If I have a document open and we're on a teams meeting together - guess how he shows up in teams? "Idiot Smith". Difficult situation.

There are two questions here:
1. Why do people in my contacts show up as their display name from my contacts rather than their display name from the global?
2. Why do I show up to everyone in the organization as my own nickname for myself rather than as my display name from the global? Even when I'm not currently connected to the document?

[#6]

Just don't use nicknames. You can set "John Doe" both in the GAL and in your contacts, correct?

[#7]

@Victor Ivanidze I could. However the real question is WHY does Teams pull information from my contacts rather than from my network credentials or from the global and how do I make it not do that?  Teams shouldn’t show any information from my contacts ever!  It does this even when I mark contacts as private. 

But to answer your question, the problem is that if I have one contact with John Doe (my name) and I have all of my email addresses listed, when I type my name I have to choose which email address to use. I might as well just type the whole thing. By having an alias I can get to the right email address with fewer key strokes.

[#8]

I think the answer to both questions is that the address is sought first in your personal book and if not found then it looks in the global address book.  I don't know if the priority could be switched but I doubt it.  It's keyed to the actual email address email address removed for privacy reasons.  In general, I agree there is a lot to learn about address books, contacts, Outlook Contact Groups, etc.