# Partitioning the External (Off-board) Directory

You can partition (filter) the external corporate directory such that users are only presented a subset of the corporate directory contact entries. For example, supplier contacts could be excluded from the directories of users who do not need to call these numbers.

You can partition the directory by organizational unit or by attribute:

- Organizational unit: When users perform a search, the results are only drawn from the entries in their organizational unit.

- Attribute: When users perform search, only results that share the same attribute are presented

## Conditions

- Directory partitioning is limited to corporate contacts only. It is not supported for users.

- Users can place calls to contacts that do not appear in their directories (that is, users can still place calls to contacts that have been filtered out).

- An SSL connection to the external directory is not supported.

- If you are partitioning an external directory for a deployment that includes MiVoice Business with Flow Through Provisioning enabled, you must configure the organizational units for the department and location containers in the meta directory without accented characters (see Special Accent Handling for Flow Through Provisioning for details).

- MiCollab Client strips the punctuation and performs transliteration (applies accents) when doing external searches on Generic LDAP connections for all PBX integrations to cover MiVoice Business without Flow Through Provisioning and MiVoice MX-ONE cases.

## Partition by Organizational Units

To partition (filter) the MiCollab Client corporate contact directory by organizational unit:

1. Under Configuration, click Integrated Directory Service.

2. In the Actions column for the desired domain, click Edit. The Integrated Directory Service connection page opens.

3. Check the External search box.

4. In the Partition attribute field, select the attribute that you want to use to filter out contacts from the corporate directory. You can select one of the following: None, City, Company Name, Country, Department, Info, Info 2, Language, Location, Position, Postal/ZIP Code, Street or Title.

5. In the Partition method field, select organizational unit.

6. Click Save.

Example:

In Active Directory, the following organizational units have been created to contain the contacts for the company:

OU=Contacts,OU=Kanata,DC=Mitel,DC=gov

OU=Contacts,OU=Denver,DC=Mitel,DC=gov

OU=Contacts,OU=Toronto,DC=Mitel,DC=gov

The company directory includes the contact numbers of product suppliers. The majority of users do not call these suppliers; however, the purchasing agents in each city (Kanata, Denver, or Toronto) need access to these contacts to place orders for product. In this case, you want the purchasing agents to only see the supplier contacts that are located in their city.

In Active Directory tag the supplier contacts with a custom "supplier" attribute. Also, tag the purchasing agents who need access to the supplier contacts with the "supplier" attribute. Then, in the MiCollab IDS Mapping form, map the custom "supplier" attribute to an MiCollab IDS attribute (for example, the "Info" attribute).

To partition the corporate directory such that only purchasing agents see the supplier contacts in their city (organizational unit):

- Set the Partition search attribute to "Info".

- Set the Partition method to "organizational unit".

In this case, the system partitions the corporate directory based on the "Info" attribute within each organizational unit. Users with the "Info" attribute will see their local supplier contacts listed in their corporate directories.

## Partition by Attribute

When you partition (filter) the external corporate directory by attribute, users who perform a search will only find directory entries that share the same attribute.

To partition the MiCollab Client corporate contact directory by attribute:

1. Under Configuration, click Integrated Directory Service.

2. In the Actions column for the desired domain, click Edit. The Integrated Directory Service connection page opens.

3. Check the External search box.

4. In the Partition attribute field, select the attribute that you want to use to filter out contacts from the corporate directory.

5. In the Partition method field, select attribute.

6. Click Save.

Example:

Users are assigned to one of three departments: Marketing, Sales and Purchasing.

To partition the corporate directory such that users only see the contacts in their own department:

- Set the Partition search attribute to "department".

- Set the Partition method to "attribute".