Corporate directory

The product reads from the corporate directory and never writes to it. No users are created, no groups are changed, no details are updated — there are four reads and that is all.

Use	What is read
Signing in	Authenticating the user by the employee id they typed
Group membership check	Whether the user belongs to the group allowed to sign in
Contact search	Name, email, username, employee id, department and title
Filling in the system owner	Email and phone, when an event is created

Contact search is the same search everywhere a person is picked — the contacts step of the scheduling wizard, recipient groups, the task editor, and the People search page. The result comes back in the same shape in all of them.

How the search matches

• At least two characters are required.
• The match is anchored to the beginning of the value: a first name, surname, username or email address that starts with what was typed. An employee id is matched whole and exactly.
• A first name and a surname match in either order, so there is no need to remember which way round the directory holds them.
• The People search page shows up to 60 results, and says explicitly when the search was cut short.

The system owner's phone number

Where the directory holds several numbers for one person, the product prefers a mobile number. The reason is practical: an SMS reminder sent to a landline is swallowed with no error, so nothing anywhere indicates that the reminder did not arrive. When there is no mobile number at all, whatever number exists is shown — this value is also displayed as the owner's contact number, and a landline beats nothing.

Which directory fields are read is part of the deployment's configuration rather than fixed in the product. Directory schemas differ between organizations, and a field an organization does not have simply comes back empty.

What the search needs in order to work

Contact search requires a read account of its own in the directory. Signing in does not depend on it — users can still sign in while search is unavailable.