Exchange 2007 and Simple Display Name

The Simple Display Name option in Exchange (using the displayNamePrintable) attribute is an IA5-String that is designed to hold only ASCII printable characters. The intent is to provide an alterative to the display name for systems that only support ASCII characters (such as mail gateways to mainframe systems from a few years back.)

However, Exchange 2003 allowed you to set a Registry key that would change the display name on messages that were leaving the organization (external messages) from the displayName attribute to the simple display name. This is a VERY handy feature for those of us who have a display name that has information such as department, job code, title, etc... and we don't want that information being sent to external recipients. The ability to have an internal and an external display name is very useful! You can do this in Exchange Server 2003, here is a KB article that will help with this:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/888416

Microsoft is now finally supporting this feature in Exchange Server 2007. (Yay!) It is supported on a per "Remote Domain" basis and is a property of the remote domain. Starting with Exchange Server 2007 SP1 RU4 (rollup 4), you can enable this feature using the Exchange Management Shell. To do this, for the default "remote domain", you would type the following EMS command:
Set-RemoteDomain "Default" -UseSimpleDisplayName $true
(Thanks to Exchange guru Henrik Walther for the syntax!)