How can we differentiate @mention results for users with the same name in cloud?

[jeremyn]

We recently migrated from confluence server to cloud and have run into a rather annoying (and problem causing) issue: We have two developers with the same first and last names, and we can no longer differentiate them in mentions.

In server you could use UPN/user name in the mention and the correct person would show up. In Cloud you seemingly can only use display name and you get both of them....In our case they are both developers in the same division, but different teams, and are now missing important things because people are just guessing one.

We use Access and AD/SCIM sync, so its not like I can just go and change their names. I suppose we could ask IT to change their display names to first middle last or something like that, but that seems like it shouldn't be needed.

Has anyone else run into this and how did you overcome it?

<update> Inspecting the page data we discovered that the field "data-mention-name" is set to UPN/user name for one of the users (ie jbsmith) and the display name (ie James Smith) for the other...is seems if we could update this field somehow to be user name for both it would start working again.

<update 2> After looking at a bunch of random users' data-mention-names (myself included) it seems that perhaps this is somehow tied to existing Atlassian account setups and isn't re-set to our AD data when we migrated to Atlassian Access control of our domain? Names seem to be all over the place.

[jeremyn · Accepted solution]

So I found that data-mention-names is the "Public Name" field in a users Atlassian profile, which is user editable and can't be controlled by the directory config etc. And there seems to be no search criteria that uses the AD username/User Principal Name as a key.

So it seems that for people who are looking to be able to use user name (at least for MS AD/Atlassian Access based companies like ours) you need to convince your users to make their public names their user names (meh). In my specific case the devs impacted were more than happy to do it so they stopped getting mentioned for each others work.

[Summer Hogan · Accepted solution]

Hi @jeremyn - this may be a simplistic answer, but have you thought about them each adding a picture of themselves to their profile photo so they can be differentiated and then maybe send an email or send a chat that shows the pictures of each to inform people who is who? 

[jeremyn]

Good Idea Summer, I did just this (since I could as Admin) while I was waiting for them to get back to me.