Outlook uses detail (otherwise called display) templates to
format and display directory information when users view details about
objects in the GAL. You can customize the templates to add or remove
fields or change the text descriptions (labels) of the fields.
Customizing display templates is a relatively common occurrence in
large organizations but less common in smaller organizations, which
typically stay with the default versions shipped with Exchange.
Figure 1
illustrates a simple customization of a display template. The rightmost
screen is the standard Organization property page, and the left side is
the customized version. Outlook 2013 is used in both cases, but the
same techniques apply to Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010. Two new
attributes about the mailbox are visible in the customized template:
Contoso Accounting Code. Most
large organizations assign employees to cost centers or similar
accounting structures. Users might want to access this information to
know what they should enter in documents such as expense reports. You
can adapt one of the standard Exchange properties for this purpose by
renaming it, but it is usually better to use one of the 15 extended
properties Exchange provides for customizations like this.
Employee Type. Again,
depending on the culture of the organization, you might want to display
information about a user’s employment status (permanent, part-time,
contractor, or, in this case, executive) to other users.
You
can modify display templates through the Exchange toolbox. Click
Details Templates from the list of utilities in the toolbox and then
select Open Tool from the action pane. The tool is a new instance of
Microsoft Management Console (MMC) that reads the information about
available details templates from Active Directory and loads them into
the console as shown in Figure 2.
You can use the tool to modify templates in any of the languages
Exchange supports. If you operate in a multilingual organization, you
should be consistent and make the same changes to the details templates
for each language version of the Outlook client you deploy. For
example, if you deploy the Swedish, Finnish, German, and English
versions of Outlook, you should update the details templates for these
four languages.
The user template is the most commonly customized template. Because it was an example in Figure 1,
I will explain how to apply the customizations described before. To
work with a template, find it in the list and double-click it. Exchange
fetches the details of the current template from Active Directory. The
template in which you are interested is the en-US\User template. This
is the English language—U.S. variant—of the user details template.
Despite Exchange being used in English in many other places, such as
the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Australia, that often do not share the
same spelling or usage of words, you have only one English-language
details template with which to work. The same is true of one Spanish
template, one Portuguese template, and so on. The rule is therefore
that whatever changes you make have to apply to the broadest possible
user population that accesses Exchange in whatever language you choose.
Note
You
can also see that the console includes a Restore option. This is your
fallback in case you make an absolute mess of editing a template; the
option restores a template to its original version as shipped in the
Exchange kit. If you select this option, you will lose all the work you
did on a template, but it’s sometimes the best (or only) choice.
The
template editor provided with Exchange 2013 is much the same as that
used with Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010. It is still basic by
comparison to most layout editors, but it gets the job done. Figure 3
shows the Organization tab of the user details template loaded, and you
can see that the added accounting code field is selected.
The
toolbox on the left enables you to select different types of controls
for the various properties you want to display. To add a new field,
select the type you want, drag it into position on the page, and then
set its properties, such as the attribute you want to display. In this
case, Contoso Accounting Code is displayed in a simple edit box that is
linked to the ms-Exch-Extension-Attribute15 mailbox attribute
(otherwise known as CustomAttribute15). You can click a drop-down list
of available attributes for the mailbox object.
The control types you can choose from are the following:
Checkbox. Used for on–off or yes–no fields such as flags indicating that an object has a particular status.
Edit. Displays
only one value for an attribute. For example, users have only one first
name, which comes from the Given-Name attribute. In the example, the
edit box is the best option because the accounting codes and employee
type are single-value attributes.
Listbox. Displays
data for a list of attributes that come from different objects. For
example, a user can be a member of many distribution groups, so the
Member Of page has a list box that is populated from the
Is-Member-Of-DL attribute.
Multivalued Listbox. Displays
data for an attribute that can have multiple values. For example, user
objects can have multiple email addresses, so the Email Addresses page
has a single multivalued list box that is populated from the
Proxy-Addresses attribute.
Label. Holds
a language-dependent text string and typically appears alongside
another control that holds data. Some characters in the label fields
are underlined to indicate that users can navigate to these fields by
using the Alt+letter key combination. For example, the S in the
Supervisor field is underlined, so you can move to it with an Alt+S
combination. You include the ampersand (&) character in the label
control value to set this up, so the value in the label field in this
case is &Supervisor.
Groupbox. Specifies
a group of fields around which Outlook draws a line when it displays
the template. For example, the General page of the user template has a
line around the First, Last, Display, and Alias fields.
After
you’ve saved the customized template, Exchange makes it available
immediately to any Outlook client that connects in online mode. Outlook
clients that connect in cached Exchange mode won’t be able to see the
customized template until the next time they connect and download the
OAB.
