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Problem

Some of our user names are just ridiculous. It's also something that I can't change.

Let's take Miles Davis, for example:

  • His user name is MDavis. That's not bad at all.
  • Seeing a report with MDavis let's me know that Miles is on the project pretty reasonably.
  • Assigning a case to Miles isn't that hard either, as long as I remember that his last name is Davis.

Now let's look at John Coltrane:

  • John's user name is X15439c03
  • Seeing a report with X15439c03 doesn't really help me know who's working on it. Especially compared to X154*4*9c03.
  • Assigning a case to X15439c03 is frustrating.
    • First of all, even if I have the exact nonsensical string memorized, there's still a good chance I'll mistype it without even realizing it.
    • Second of all, this makes it a real pain to assign it someone out of your normal circle.

Request

  1. Can we get some kind of nick name field or firstname and lastname fields for users?
  2. Can we use the nick name or first+last in the Assigned To field and reports?

Fog Creek Case FC1858827

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why do some of your users have names that aren't their actual full name? – adambox♦ Feb 18 2010 at 18:34
We have almost 10,000 employees. There are entire sites that came over from acquisitions. While we've incorporated them, they often retain some part of the their pre-acquisition heritage. User names sometimes don't change from how they were before the company was acquired. Some of our departments have usernames based on firstinitial+lastname, others use lastname+firstinitial+middleinitial. Others are based in some insanity I can't even begin to speculate upon. In any case, I have no control over it. I've worked at other large companies that with vague user names so this might be common – Marc Moroz Feb 18 2010 at 19:24
please bear with me if I'm a little slow on this, I just need to understand the exact use case. If adding an alias field, which would need to be filled in for all the users with unusual usernames, why not just update the user's fullname field instead? This can be done by an administrator. Note you can create users via the xml api, but not edit them. I just opened a case (FC1857845) to add that ability. – adambox♦ Feb 19 2010 at 21:17
We can't edit the fullname field for LDAP reasons. We need the LDAP info to be consistent throughout all of our apps so the goofy usernames have to stay. If we could get some kind of alias functionality, it would really help. Maybe a float-over showing the alias or the ability to use alias instead of username for assignedto and reports. Would it be easier to talk this out on the phone? – Marc Moroz Feb 19 2010 at 22:25
This is a good point. I've filed a feature request and alerted the program manager. These kinds of enterprise headaches are something we need to address. – Rich Armstrong♦ Feb 23 2010 at 18:28

1 Answer

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I second that and have asked for such a feature a while ago in the context of community users. (Case FC1709283)

Here is the complement to the above rational - not making the user more recognizable but the opposite, allow an alias.

In the case of public discussion boards, corporate users may hesitate to either comment as guests or even register an account with their full name being then shown on every post (can be googled etc.) and with no control over deletion or retention of such posts.

So yes, please consider to extend the FB user record with an username / alias field for ALL user types - regular users and community users.

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