Null Users? But They Are Real People but not in TDI

Happy New Year!

So what's wrong with TDI? (This affects 6.0 and 7.0 so far which is the versions running) It seems there is an ominous line that states:

"The population wizard populates only those entries where the value for surname is not null."

And this can be found in 2.5 and 3.0 IBM Lotus Connections documentation and wikis here, here and here.

That's fine but what do you do for the Null family? Poor James, Sara, Amy, Fred, John Boy, Scarlett and whomever else with Null as a last name? They can't get in? No Connections for them? So what is going on?

There were some vague TDI references in fix packs to attributes with NULL in them. We are waiting on IBM for some direction because those fix packs are not compatible, per documentation, with Connections 3.0.1.

We also worry what this will do inside Connections when it hits the Null fields on logins or searches or links or whatever. So working around TDI is one thing, Connections is another.

We do know this much, new people never get added to the profiles database. People already added, never get deleted if they left the company and anyone else is there because when you do the first load off a CSV file evidently TDI could care less and accepts what you submit. BUT if TDI is to run and get updates programmatically it checks for any Last Name field which is empty/Null and stops processing that person.

When we have an update from IBM will post it, until then if anyone has some insight please let me know your experience.

PS - My apologies to the IBM QA team for TDI and Connections, you have one more thing to add to your lists.