Unified Personal Communicator 8.x: Fetch Contact Photos from a Web Server Configuration Example

Document ID: 113200

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Introduction
Prerequisites
      Requirements
      Components Used
      Conventions
Fetch Contact Photos from a Web Server
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Introduction

This document describes how to fetch the contact photos on Cisco Unified Personal Communicator (CUPC) 8.x from a web server.

Note: CUPC 8 does not support fetching photos from LDAP.

Prerequisites

Requirements

Make sure that you meet these requirements before you attempt this configuration:

Integrate the LDAP Directory with CUPC.

Components Used

The information in this document is based on these software and hardware versions:

CUPC 8.x
Cisco Unified Presence Server (CUPS) 8.x

The information in this document was created from the devices in a specific lab environment. All of the devices used in this document started with a cleared (default) configuration. If your network is live, make sure that you understand the potential impact of any command.

Conventions

Refer to the Cisco Technical Tips Conventions for more information on document conventions.

Fetch Contact Photos from a Web Server

You can configure a URL string with a parameter in the Photo field located in the LDAP attribute map so that CUPC can fetch photos from a web server instead of from the LDAP server.

This is a substitution technique where you specify a working URL that fetches a JPG photo. This will work only if CUPC can use the results of the query in order to insert the photo into the template. If the web server that hosts the photos within a company requires a POST (for example, the name of the user is not in the URL) or uses some other cookie name for the photo instead of the username, this technique will not work.

Complete these steps:

Host the photos on a web server. (Any web server, like IIS or Apache, can be used for hosting photos.)

Note: The web server should point to the location where the photos are stored.
Go to Application > Cisco Unified Personal Communicator > Settings on the CUPS.
Set the Photo field with the URL. For example:
```
http://mycompany.cisco.com/photo/std/%%sAMAccountName%%.jpg
```
You must include the double percent symbols (%%) in this string and they must enclose the name of the LDAP attribute to substitute. CUPC removes the percent symbols and replaces the parameter inside with the results of an LDAP query for the user whose photo it resolves.
The URL string must contain an LDAP attribute with a query value containing a piece of data that uniquely identifies the photo of the user.
Use the User ID (%%<userID>%%) attribute as the substitution string.

Note: You can use any LDAP attribute whose query value contains a piece of data that uniquely identifies the photo of the user. For example, http://mycompany.cisco.com/photo/std/%%uid%%.jpg.

If a query result contains the attribute "uid" with a value of "johndoe," then a template such as http://mycompany.com/photos/%%uid%%.jpg creates the URL http://mycompany.com/photos/johndoe.jpg. CUPC attempts to fetch the photo.

Note: The URL length is limited to 50 characters.

Note: CUPC does not support authentication for this query; the photo must be retrievable from the web server without credentials.