How would it be possible to hook into civi's searches to always lookup a custom field when searching for name?
Background: In our setup we handle big departments as distinct contacts. Their name is the base organization name and we provide a custom field "Additional name" in which the department's name is stored.
Example:
Contact A: Base Organization named "University of Bielefeld",
Contact B: Department of A named "University of Bielefeld" with
additional name "Faculty of Physics"
Contact C: Department of A named "University of Bielefeld" with
additional name "FooBar Institute"
We do this for different reasons, for instance because pdf letter addressing is simpler.
Problem: If our users head over to search box, advanced search or simple search and fill the name or name/email field with "foobar", they don't get correct results.
Any ideas?