Large companies often have employees with the same name. In the sample case shown here, "John Doe" will be used, but there might be three Bill Smith's or two Sun Li's. One of challenges is knowing which is the correct name to use, so that the appropriate person gets the assignment or task.
Such was the problem discovered when attempting to reassign an incident in Servicedesk. As you can see in the screenshot below , there is no way, after searching for "John", to be able to tell which "John Doe" is the correct one to have the incident assigned to. One of these might be the CEO, who would have no part in IT incident work, and the other is the correct one. How can you tell?
There are a few different methods to resolve this. If one of these users came from Active Directory, a change to the name to define him as "John Doe1" could work. The same could be used for the Servicedesk Portal users accounts. Since email address is a key field in Servicedesk, and must be unique, there is a way, with a small modification of the SD.IncidentEscalation workflow, to cause the listed users to display both their display name and their email address, making it very easy then to determine to which is the correct user to reassign the case. This will assure that the CEO does not get the case assigned to him!
There are a few assumptions made here. First, you are comfortable working with workflows and Workflow Designer, publishing files, etc. Second, that you wisely backup all existing projects prior to doing this.
You can also see how this affects groups. If the groups have a email address defined, it would show up as well.
While there are certainly other methods to work around this, this is a simple method to differentiate between like-named users.