Profile Photos for CUPC / Jabber

Good afternoon,

In my newpost, I want to talk about how to add user avatars (profile photos) for CUPC or Jabber centrally. Using these communicators becomes much more interesting and more convenient if we visually see a photo of our contact. But not everyone knows how to make avatars to be displayed on your device. This is what we will talk about in the next few minutes.
In fact, everything is very simple. For centralized profile photo management a web-server is required. In our example I am using Windows 2003 Server with IIS (Internet Information Services) enabled. In the folder for web access (C: Inetpub wwwroot) let’s create a new folder with name photos. We will place here the avatars of users as jpg-files. Profile photo files should have the same name as the user account in Active Directory. For example, suppose that my account in AD is dbenda. Then, the image file, referred to as my avatar, must be named as dbenda.jpg.

Then adjust the Cisco Unified Presense. Link to avatars is created in the Application -> Cisco Unified Personal Communicator -> Settings:

Find CUPC LDAP Attribute Mapping settings and  change the Photo parameter, which indicates a link to our avatars.Profile photo file name is specified in the following format:

%% SAMAccountName %%. Jpg
(that’s why the names of avatars match account names in AD).

In our example, the link is as follows (IP address of our web-server is 10.1.1.9):

http://10.1.1.9/photos/%%sAMAccountName%%.jpg


That’s all the wisdom 🙂 Then you can run CUPC / Jabber, login and enjoy the avatars of your colleagues. 🙂

Have a nice weekend!