Hiding Distribution lists from SharePoint Membership List

Question

On the "My site" feature of MOSS 2007 there is a "memberships" Web part that shows the distribution list that the user is a member of.

This is picking up several groups that we would rather not be shown e.g. some that have been set up for administrative purposes only.

Is there any way to control which groups are shown; ideally this would be using (EDIT) the hide from exchange option in AD.

Answer 1

Someone on stackoverflow answered the question - deny the account that trawls ADpermission to read the groups (whether individually or by OU).

Answer 2

You could write a little jQuery script that would hide certain items for the user, if you are happy to accept that you will have to update the script once you add another distribution list that needs to be hidden (unless they all conform to a certain naming convention i.e. starts with "testlist-xxxx").

Answer 3

I can see where it could get cluttered in a large org with a lot of Distro Lists. Users can remove individual ones but that would be tedious. I like Japp's answer with hiding it via jQuery if there is a standard naming convention and they can be identified from the others.

Answer 4

That's an interesting problem to have, lots of approaches, the custom web part is a good one.

If you go down the path of custom web part, removing the sharepoint one and adding your own is easy via the WebPartPages web service or even the object model. You must also remove it and replace with yours in the site def so new sites don't have it when created.

Finally, another solution would be to remove them out of the profile database via a trigger, but you'd have to be open to that idea as a very last resort.