Office 365 Simple Display Name

[dgsmith]

With our exchange server, we were able to specify what name displayed when sending emails externally (so for me, emails from me internally displayed as from "Mr Smith" but externally they simply show as "David Smith"), however since the migration to O365 all emails just show from the standard display name (Mr Smith).

 

Obviously we don't want to be changing the actual display names as these are relevant for internal network purposes, however does anyone know of the O365 equivalent to exchange's Simple Display Name feature?

[rpwillis]

Office 365 and Exchange Online support Simple Display Name in the same way as on premise Exchange does, you just need to set it up.

 

You will need to use PowerShell to set it up. Once connected to Exchange then you need to set the Remote Domain to use Simple Display Names and set the Simple Display Name for all users.

 

To set up the remote domain use

Set-RemoteDomain -Identity Default -UseSimpleDisplayName $false

This is assuming that you just have the standard default remote domain. You can check this by running Get-RemoteDomain and you should get something similar to

 

Name DomainName AllowedOOFType

---- ---------- --------------

Default * External

 

To set the simple domain name for a user, it's as simple as

Set-User -Identity [email protected] -SimpleDisplayName "My simple name"

 

If a user doesn't have a simple display name and the remote domain is set up to use them, then it will just use the smtp address, it will not fall back to the display name.

 

Note, it takes some time for the settings to take affect after you set then. It took an hour or two to work for me after I made the change.