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Customize contact cards in Skype for Business

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Do you want to customize your contact cards in Lync or Skype for Business environment? If yes, then this blog is for you.

I started to research on this requirement when one of my customer wanted to publish their Exchange Extension Attribute in the Skype for Business Contact Card. Many organizations use Exchange Extension Attributes to update their internal information like Employee ID, Cost Center etc. These are not default fields that is available in Skype for Business Contact Card. I know your first thought would be why can’t we use the ABSConfig tool for this. We will not be able to use ABSConfig tool to implement this change because ABSConfig is used to map Lync contact Fields with the AD attributes or to specify the AD attribute to be included or excluded in the Address Book files.

In this blog we are going to see how we can tweak the registry to achieve this.

First, Let’s see how does a fully populated contact card looks like:

We have 16 Fields in a Contact Card that can be modified:

image

Table-1:

Contact Card Field

Value

Email (email address)

1

Work (work phone)

2

Work2 (work phone 2)

3

WorkFax (work fax)

4

Mobile (mobile phone)

5

Home (home phone)

6

Home2 (home phone 2)

7

Other (other phone)

8

IM (IM address)

9

Profile (profile)

10

Office (office location)

11

Company (company)

12

WorkAdd (work address)

13

HomeAdd (home address)

14

OtherAdd (other address)

15

Birthday (birthday)

16

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

With Skype for Business and Outlook installed, we can customize the contact card via Registries. SfB shares contact card with MS Office. We can use the below registries to change the Labels (1-16) as shown in above screenshot and Values as per Table-2

Note: This will work only within the Internal Network since it requires AD access and Outlook Installed

 

Registry Information:

Backup your Registry before making any changes.

Skype for Business 2015:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common\ContactCard]

Skype for Business 2016:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\ContactCard]

 

String : TurnOnContactTabLabelReplace#Value: “New Label”

This Registry will replace the default label shown in above table-1.

Example: If you want to change the label Birthday to Team, Change the # to 16 and Value to “Team”

DWORD : TurnOnContactTabMAPIReplace#Value: The hexadecimal value as per Table-2

This Registry will replace the Value of the corresponding Label (#) via MAPI.

Example: If you want to use extensionAttribute1, mention 802D001F      

String: TurnOnContactTabADReplace# Value : AD DS Attribute as per Table-2

 

This Registry will replace the Value of the corresponding Label (#) via AD.

Example: If you want to use extensionAttribute1, mention ExtensionAttribute1

 

*Replace the # with an integer between 1 and 16, based on the values that are listed in Table 1.

 

Table-2:

AD DS Attribute

MAPI value

legacyExchangeDN

3003001f

info

3004001f

mail

39fe001f

displayNamePrintable

39ff001f

mailNickname

3a00001f

givenName

3a06001f

telephoneNumber

3a08001f

homePhone

3a09001f

Initials

3a0a001f

cn

3a0f001f

sn

3a11001f

company

3a16001f

title

3a17001f

department

3a18001f

physicalDeliveryOfficeName

3a19001f

Mobile

3a1c001f

displayName

3a20001f

pager

3a21001f

facsimileTelephoneNumber

3a23001f

co

3a26001f

l

3a27001f

st

3a28001f

streetAddress

3a29001f

postalCode

3a2a001f

telephoneAssistant

3a2e001f

msExchAssistantName

3a30001f

homePostalAddress

3a5d001f

homeMTA

8007001f

C

8069001f

street

813a001f

employeeNumber

8c67001f

personalPager

8c68001f

employeeType

8c69001f

personalTitle

8c6b001f

ExtensionAttribute1

802D001F

ExtensionAttribute2

802E001F

ExtensionAttribute3

802F001F

ExtensionAttribute4

8030001F

ExtensionAttribute5

8031001F

ExtensionAttribute6

8032001F

ExtensionAttribute7

8033001F

ExtensionAttribute8

8034001F

ExtensionAttribute9

8035001F

ExtensionAttribute10

8036001F

ExtensionAttribute11

8C57001F

ExtensionAttribute12

8C58001F

ExtensionAttribute13

8C59001F

ExtensionAttribute14

8C60001F

ExtensionAttribute15

8C61001F

 

Let us walk through some scenarios:

The original Contact Card:

image

 

Scenario-1:

The scenario we want to implement is to add “Alias” and “Team” to our contact card. To do that we will replace the default fields as below:

New Label

Default Contact Label

AD Attribute

MAPI Value

Alias

WorkFax (4)

mailNickname

3a00001f

Team

Birthday (16)

extensionAttribute1

802D001F

To do this, add below registries:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common\contactcard]

"turnoncontacttablabelreplace4"="Alias"

"turnoncontacttabmapireplace4"=dword: 3a00001f

"turnoncontacttabadreplace4"=" mailNickname"

"turnoncontacttablabelreplace16"="Team"

"turnoncontacttabmapireplace16"=dword: 802D001F

"turnoncontacttabadreplace16"="extensionAttribute1"

Contact Card after scenario-1 Changes:

image

 

 

Scenario-2

Now let’s implement a scenario to add “Assistant” field to our Contact Card. To do this we will replace the fields as shown below:

New Label

Default Contact Label

AD Attribute

MAPI Value

Assistant

Home Phone (6)

msExchAssistantName

3a30001f

To do this, add below registries:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common\contactcard]

"turnoncontacttablabelreplace4"="Assistant"

"turnoncontacttabmapireplace4"=dword: 3a30001f

"turnoncontacttabadreplace4"="msExchAssistantName"

Contact Card after Scenario-2 Changes:

image

 

Hope this was helpful!

Dilip Kumar P

Support Escalation Engineer – Microsoft

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 18, 2016
    Good one Dilip...! Very detailed :)
    • Anonymous
      May 18, 2016
      Thanks, Pragathi!-Dilip
  • Anonymous
    May 19, 2016
    This article helps us a lot. Thanks for providing such in-depth steps.
    • Anonymous
      May 19, 2016
      Thanks for the feedback, Heman!
  • Anonymous
    May 20, 2016
    Nice article Dilip :) everyone loves customizing their contact cards. This is a ready reckoner for them.
    • Anonymous
      May 24, 2016
      Thanks Sankhadeep!
  • Anonymous
    May 24, 2016
    Absolutely crisp and clear documentation for where and what to look for. Thanks Dilip :)
    • Anonymous
      May 25, 2016
      Thanks Ajay!
  • Anonymous
    June 28, 2016
    Hello, I tried this and it's not working. No matter what I give, it's not changing. another strange thing, I have skype for business 2016 installed, but there wasn't a key called 16 in the registry. There was a key 15 with contactcard key inside common. I added it there, and it didn't work. So I added a new key called 16 and the whole structure (common and then contact card) and then added the values there - that also didn't work.
    • Anonymous
      October 20, 2016
      Hi Ranjit!We are using registry entries to change the label of the Contact card. (You can see the default labels in Table-1)After you publish the registry entries, do you see the values with the default labels? If you do not see the value/ default label, then there is some issue with Address Book download/ value not syncing from AD.Please share some more details like, what was the registry values used and what do you see in the contact card. Ensure the attributes are updated in Active Directory.Hope this helps!-Dilip
  • Anonymous
    September 07, 2016
    Excellent blog Dilip.
    • Anonymous
      October 20, 2016
      Thanks Pratik!
  • Anonymous
    October 20, 2016
    Hi Dilip,This is amazing information and saved a lot of time for us. I have customized my Skype for Business Contact card but is there a way that the same can be done in for Outlook 2013 contact card under windows 10 because after doing the changes, I can see the Alias in Skype for Business card however the same is not visible in the Outlook contact cards.It will be very helpful.Regards
    • Anonymous
      October 20, 2016
      The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    November 02, 2016
    Nice Dilip, How to customize contact card for all users in Bulk?(We have users from Onsite and offshore)
    • Anonymous
      January 31, 2017
      Hi Vijay, you can push the registry entries via Group Policy.-Dilip
  • Anonymous
    December 01, 2016
    Dilip,Does this work with 0365 exchange and Skype 2016?
    • Anonymous
      January 31, 2017
      Hi James,Yes, this applies for O365 Exchange and Skype for Business.-Dilip
  • Anonymous
    January 10, 2017
    The comment has been removed
    • Anonymous
      January 31, 2017
      Hi Mark,Currently the Skype for Business client shows "External Network" in the contact card for Federated contacts. If I find any other ways to publish the Company information, will let you know.-Dilip
  • Anonymous
    January 19, 2017
    Monster Inc. Funny! :)Thank you! Very useful!.
    • Anonymous
      January 31, 2017
      Thanks Andrei! :)