Address Book search for “First + Last Name” when Display Name is “Last, First Name” (WebSearchOnly)

It is quite common to have users stored in Active Directory (AD) with “Last, First Name” (e. g., “Paulino, David”). Since Lync/SfB is heavily dependent on AD, what will happen to users that want to search for “First + Last Name”?

Regarding the Address Book download, this is an issue that has already been discussed in a previous post:

Last + First name searches in Lync/Skype4B Address Book (GalContacts.db)

However, when we use WebSearchOnly and we have the AD Display Name as “Last, First Name”, we may get some complaints from users saying they cannot search for “First + Last Name”. The reason for this is most likely that their intention is to search for a user with additional text in their Display Name, like “Carmine, Anthony (COG)”, but they end up searching only for “Anthony Carmine”.

Here are some examples:

Looking in the RTCAB database, we notice that Display Names with a comma have more entries:

Note: The attribute 3 represents the Display Name:

Again, this will only work if we have a comma in the Display Name. Without it, we will only be able to search for the Display Name itself: