The standard address book meets the needs of most companies
throughout the world. Presenting users and groups sorted by first name
or last name does not work so well in companies where the culture is
strongly based on adherence to a hierarchical structure, especially in
East Asian countries. In these situations, the desired result is to
present the organization in terms of seniority so that the most
important members are listed first. Users can then search down through
the address book of the organization, following its structure. For
example, they can move from the CEO to the vice presidents who run
major departments, to the directors, managers, and then individual
contributors.
From
Exchange 2010 SP1 onward, any Outlook client later than Outlook 2007
SP2 can display a hierarchical address book (HAB) if the necessary
steps are taken to establish the hierarchy within Exchange. You can
follow these steps to create a new HAB. Steps 1 and 3 are optional
insofar as you don’t strictly need to use a dedicated OU for the HAB.
However, its use enables you to maintain a clear separation between the
objects that form the HAB and the other Exchange groups and users.
Steps 4 and 5 can be combined into a single set of Set-Group commands.
They are isolated here to emphasize the need for the two distinct
properties that must be set to allow objects to be included in the HAB.
Create an OU in Active Directory to act as container for the groups and user objects that will form the HAB.
Configure
the organization with the alias of the group that will act as the root
of the HAB. In this case, mark a group containing the CEO’s email
address as the root of the HAB:
Set-OrganizationConfig –HierarchicalAddressBook DG-CEO1
Add the groups and users that will form the HAB into the OU. Again, this is an optional step.
Modify each group object that will be in the HAB to set its IsHierarchicalGroup property to $True.
Set-Group –Identity DG-CEO1 –IsHierarchicalGroup $True
Modify
each group and user object that will be in the HAB to set its
SeniorityIndex property to an integer value that Exchange will use to
sort the HAB. An object with a SeniorityIndex value of 1 will be at the
top of the HAB, so if your CEO represents the top of the organization,
you’d set this value to 1 for his object (or for the group object that
might contain the CEO and members of his staff). Groups and users that
occur farther down the hierarchy are assigned higher SeniorityIndex
values.
Set-Group –Identity DG-CEO1 –SeniorityIndex 1
Set-Group –Identity DG-Senior-VP2 –SeniorityIndex 2
Set-Group –Identity DG-VP3 –SeniorityIndex 3
Ensure
that groups of each level include the groups of the next level down in
their membership so that the members of each level are shown when a
user navigates through the hierarchy. For example, the HAB shown in Figure 1
uses organizational titles from the CEO downward as the basis of its
hierarchy. To create this view, the Senior Vice Presidents group is a
member of the Chief Executive Officer group, the Vice Presidents group
is a member of the Senior Vice Presidents group, and the Senior
Managers group is a member of the Vice Presidents group, with the same
arrangement based on seniority continuing for the remainder of the
hierarchy.
To
make the HAB more accessible, you can also set the PhoneticDisplayName
property for groups and users. Outlook sorts the HAB first by the
SeniorityIndex and then by PhoneticDisplayName.
Set-Group –Identity DG-HAB-Group1 –PhoneticDisplayName 'HAB Group 1'
Set-User –Identity User-HAB1 –PhoenticDisplayName 'User 1'
Open a supported version of Outlook and open the Address Book. Click the Organization tab to reveal the HAB.
Only
a single HAB can exist in an organization, and HABs can be viewed only
by Outlook clients that are configured to use cached Exchange mode and
that have successfully downloaded an OAB that was generated after the
properties of the groups that form the HAB were updated as just
described.
