Thursday, November 23, 2017

Names should not be hard


Another in a series of rants about things I see and how backward they are...

Why is it that organizations use Outlook at all? And then when they do they have their address books set up for <lastname>, <firstname>? That's not how I think of people - by their last name first! And to add injury to insult, often looking up people as <firstname> <lastname> fails!

I use Thunderbird and one of the first things I set up is an LDAP directory in the address book for the organization. Often this involves getting the secret LDAP info like server name and most importantly baseDN. Surprisingly I have been successful in getting this information most of the time! Once connected I have access to that elusive Outlook Global Address Book because essentially it's just and LDAP implementation. And my <firstname> <lastname> searches automagically start working directly in Thunderbird. Yippie!

Still there are broken search tools like SameTime's Add New Contact dialog which fails if you <firstname <lastname> search. Coupled with organizations propensity to use <lastname>, <firstname> is "Jessie Scott" "Jessie Scott" or "Scott Jessie"?

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