Customizing User Name and Group Name Display

You can customize how Instant Messenger displays contact and group names by changing the attribute used to display contact names. By default, the Instant Messenger uses the attribute cn to represent a user's display name. In your deployment, you may prefer to use uid or some other attribute instead of cn.

Contact names appear as First Name, Last Name. For example, Frank Smith, Mary Jones, and so on. When two end users have the same first name and last name, it is impossible to know which end user has to be added to the contact list. You can customize Instant Messenger to display more information in the search results for the user search, and to display additional information in the Contact tooltip to help distinguish between contacts. For example, you can display the phone number of the Contact when the mouse is placed over the Contact.

To Change the Attribute Used to Display a User's Name

1. Open iim.conf.

   See iim.conf File Syntax for instructions on locating and modifying iim.conf.

2. Specify the attribute you want to use to display usernames as the value for iim_ldap.userdisplay.

   For example, to use the nickname attribute, set the iim_ldap.userdisplay attribute as follows:

   iim_ldap.userdisplay=nickname

3. Save and close the file.

To Change the Attribute Used to Display a Group's Name

1. Open iim.conf.

   See iim.conf File Syntax for instructions on locating and modifying iim.conf.

2. Specify the attribute you want to use to display usernames as the value for iim_ldap.groupdisplay.

   For example, to use the uid attribute, set the iim_ldap.groupdisplay attribute as follows:

   iim_ldap.groupdisplay=uid

   Save and close the file.

To Customize User Name Display in Search Results

1. Extract the files from imbrand.jar.

   See Table 15–1 for default locations for imbrand.jar

2. Change to the following directory:

   com/sun/im/client/

3. Open brand.properties.

4. Add the dialogs.searchresults.format attribute to the file.

5. Add the attributes you want to include in search results in the following format:

   ${attr:attribute-name}

   Where attribute-name is the name of the LDAP attribute.

   For example, to include the title attribute, add the following line:

   dialogs.searchresults.format=(${attr:title})

6. Save your changes and close the file.

7. Repackage imbrand.jar.

8. Add the user attributes to iim.conf.

   Specify the attributes as values for the iim_ldap.userattributes parameter. Separate multiple attributes with a comma, for example:

   iim_ldap.userattributes=title,department,telephonenumber

   See iim.conf File Syntax for instructions on locating and modifying iim.conf.

To Customize Tooltip Contents

1. Extract the files from imbrand.jar.

   See Table 15–1 for default locations for imbrand.jar

2. Change to the following directory:

   com/sun/im/client/

3. Open brand.properties.

4. Add the contact.tooltip.format.html attribute to the file.

5. Specify the attribute you want to display in the tooltip as the value for contact.tooltip.format.html.

   For example, if you want to display the telephone number and email address of the contact, you would enter:

   contact.tooltip.format.html=mailto: ${attr:mail} tel: ${attr:telephonenumber}

   For more information on customizing the contents of imbrand.jar file, see Customizing the Application (Java Web Start).

6. Save your changes and close the file.

7. Repackage imbrand.jar.