Personas in EWS in Exchange 2013
Published: July 16, 2012
Learn about the personas and people search features in EWS in Exchange 2013.
Applies to: Exchange 2013 | Exchange Online
Until recently, it was common to store all your contacts in a single location — typically, on your email client. Today, it is becoming more common to store contacts in many different locations, such as on a phone, on a social networking site, in an Exchange Contacts folder, or in your organization's directory service.
You might have multiple contacts that represent the same person but contain different information; for example, one contact might include a business phone number or a fax number, or a contact stored in your Exchange Contacts folder might have a different name than the contact for the same person that is stored on your phone.
Starting with Exchange 2013, contacts from different sources that represent the same person are associated with one another, similar to the way that email messages are aggregated into conversations, by means of a common link ID. When aggregated contact information is returned by an Exchange server, it includes a set of attributes such as a source folder, a display name, an ID, and a source ID. The sum of the properties and attributes returned is known as a persona, and the set of properties returned is referred to as the persona's shape.
Because the information that makes up a persona is not stored in a single location, and because that information can change at any time, a persona is created only when you make a request to an Exchange server.
People search is the feature that defines a request for persona information. A persona request can include a sort order, and can be filtered according to a query string. For example, you can retrieve the display name and a set of all email addresses that are associated with a contact from the Contacts folder, a Hotmail account, a LinkedIn account, and a company's directory service, or a set of all personas that have IM addresses.
When the People Search feature is configured by an Exchange administrator, the linking of contacts into personas is automatic based on an algorithm that recognizes a relationship between contacts stored on various devices.
Exchange 2013 includes two operations that are related to personas and people search. The Unified Contact Store also exposes persona functionality by means of the operations that support that feature.The following table lists the operations.
|
Operation name |
Description |
|---|---|
|
FindPeople |
Returns all persona objects from a specified Contacts folder or retrieves contacts that match a specified query string. |
|
GetPersona |
Returns a set of properties associated with a specific persona, such as all the IM addresses or display names for a specified persona ID. |
You can use the GetPersona and FindPeople operations to efficiently retrieve contact information from multiple sources. Because all items related to a persona are associated with a link ID, these operations can be used in a wide variety of applications that use contact data. The following are some examples:
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A mobile phone app that uses the GetPersona operation when a user calls a contact, and then offers additional phone numbers to call if no one answers.
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An application that uses the FindPeople operation to scan Inbox messages for email addresses to determine whether they are found in an existing persona. Addresses that are not already associated with a persona can be used to create sales leads.
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A mail app for Outlook Web App and Outlook that offers different salutations based on whether correspondence is formal or informal. Formal salutations are supplied by the display names from the directory service and informal salutations come from the display name that originates in social network contacts.
