No, really, it's spelled correctly

September 4, 2024 8:24 AM

I need some guidance on how to make a request of my corporate IT department.

I work for a global corporation. Our workforce uses Microsoft Office applications. Everyone in our workforce can be found by searching their names in the Global Address List, on Slack, on Jabber, etc.

A subset of our workforce have names that, when typed in an Outlook email, or a Word document, etc., are flagged as being spelled incorrectly. These are typically names that are of African or Asian origin, although interestingly, not all names of African or Asian origin are flagged as being spelled incorrectly.

I don't think anyone should ever be told their name is spelled incorrectly by their employer or by the technology they need to use to do their job. I would like to ask our IT department to put in place a process or technical solution that would eliminate this from occurring.

Our IT department is not great. They're far more likely to buy in to fixing this if I provide them with a possible solution, rather than just bringing them the problem. But it's been 20 years since I last oversaw an IT department, and I have no idea anymore what the range of possible solutions are for a problem like this.

Are there any obvious technical or process solutions to this?

posted by NotMyselfRightNow to Technology (13 answers total)

You talk to your HR about this and make this HR's problem to bring to IT. It's a torch I would happily carry.
posted by phunniemee at 8:32 AM on September 4

Seconding HR. IT isn't going to do this sort of thing on their own initiative.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 8:33 AM on September 4

Trust me, HR's getting involved.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 8:36 AM on September 4

I know bupkis about Lookout or Word but here is a link I googled-up about adding things to their dictionaries. It should be relatively easy to suck up everyone’s names and squirt them out to be imported as additions. There’s probably some way to do that site-wide. If there is one bright young spark in IT they can probably handle that and would find it interesting.

Good luck.
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 9:03 AM on September 4

For Word, you could add their names to your dictionary (within Word). Then it will stop flagging them. I'm not sure about Outlook (I have a fairly international workplace, and I haven't noticed Outlook flagging any proper nouns myself, but maybe my workplace has different default settings?).
posted by coffeecat at 9:08 AM on September 4

Gilgamesh's Chauffeur, coffeecat - I had similar thoughts. I know each individual can modify their Microsoft dictionaries. What I'm not as certain about is if this can be done centrally, and updated repeatedly over time.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 9:14 AM on September 4

It's easy enough as a tech fix but the hard part is making the solution comprehensive and forward thinking. Consider asking for a project that the dictionary (or whatever other database they're using) be updated for every one's full name and preferred nickname and any other info/commonly used terms that are missing. All employees get an alert to review and update their name(s) and to suggest missing terms by a certain date. HR file also gets updated with name preferences and is responsible for coordinating with HR on best policy to update for future hires and other name changes such as marriage or change in preference. Hard part will be getting this prioritized. May need your employee rep group/union or legal to also support this as needed.
posted by beaning at 9:52 AM on September 4

Adding people's names to the e-mail service dictionary when they're hired is such a good idea. It ought to be standard procedure everywhere. Microsoft ought to make it easy to do and promote it for Outlook.
posted by Don Pepino at 10:26 AM on September 4

Eliminate8Hate has a campaign and downloadable dictionary on this topic. Their list focuses on Asian names but it could be a good starting point, either for a specific dictionary to install or for talking points to get IT and HR on board.
posted by terretu at 11:06 AM on September 4

Why not just make words starting with capital letters not be spell checked. Works great except if you hire bell hooks or ee cummings
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 11:14 AM on September 4

The size of the company may make implementation challenging, but my firm has some back-end way of putting every employee's name in the dictionary.
posted by slkinsey at 8:23 AM on September 5

Just off the top on my head...

You could conceivably create a custom dictionary. This potentially could be hosted on a local server, hosted in the cloud, or pushed to each machine (using Group Policy or a startup script). You point all machines at this and then you're golden!

Just kidding. Now you have to keep it up to date. This would either be a manual process or someone would need to write a script to synch with your HR system.

Someone may have a more elegant solution, but this request isn't a non-trivial request. It's going to necessitate a new workflow for onboarding and for someone to monitor the scripts (and maintain them). Ultimately, this isn't a local IT created problem, though they may get tasked with solving it. One thing to consider here is even it they get it solved for this version of Office and the currently update, any changes can break a workflow, so it'll take cycles to support this.

If I were you I'd submit this as a feature request to Microsoft.

It would be easier for MS to solve this than to do so locally. Microsoft could just say, "Allow any name in the GAL to be a valid spelling," and it's done.

FWIW: I would have to say no to this request, as I'm a one man shop. I'd throw it out there to see if anyone on my tech channels had a better idea, but I don't code, so...
posted by cjorgensen at 7:32 AM on September 9

This is an item that would seemingly be easy to do for small companies but I work for a company with 150k+ names in the address book (and I have worked at places with easily double that). People in the address book come from nearly every country and culture on earth. The anglicized versions of the names used are extremely varied down to some people with surnames listed as single letters.

What I have noticed in the most recent updates of Microsoft applications is that predictive text type ahead suggestions actively use the names of the people referenced in the email. Which is nice regardless of origin of names. I know I have friends named Jennifer, Jenafer and Gennifer.
posted by mmascolino at 11:01 AM on September 10