Working With UserProfile Service In SharePoint Online / O365

Introduction

This article demonstrates how to create and use a user property in SharePoint Online (O365). This article starts with an introduction of the UserProfile Service. Afterwards, it demonstrates how to work and play with User Profile Service. In the end, the article discusses how to play with UserProfile Service.

A user profile is the collection of user properties that describe about a single user. The properties include user's basic details, policies, and settings. Most of the organizations have big headache in maintaining a user profile proprties in an efficient way because it  plays significat role in helping people to find content that connects them with other people.

Based on the user profile properties, you can learn many things about the users and connect with them using social features like blogs and discussion.

From Office 365 directory Service, the default user properties are derived from UserProfile Service. The admin from the SharePoint Online can enhance SharePoint capabilities by adding the user profile properties, defining user policies, and creating audiences.

Here are the basic screenshots that I have added to show how to access the Userprofile Service in SharePoint O365.

Login with your trial/original version of O365 and click Admin Center.

Afterwards, you will get the new screen in the bottom, as shown above. Now, click SharePoint link to redirect to the screen given below.

User profiles can be the bane of your existence or one of the big wins for your organization.

In this user profile, three important sections are available.We will talk about one by one later. Now, I have explained about the sections givwn below.

1. People
   In this people section, admin can manage all the user properties and profiles.They can provide the permissions for the audience.
   
   
2. Organization
   This section is for managing the organization details.
   
   
3. My Site Settings
   This is totally for Mysite related topics. My sites are essentially personal portals, which gives the individual users; the ability to have a one-to-many collaboration path with the enterprise.

Now, we will see about managing user properties section in this article.

Click Manager User properties link under the Peoples heading and you will redirected to the screen given below.

The basic default properties are available under this Manager user properties link and here you can use this page to add, edit, organize, delete or map the user profile properties. The profile properties can be mapped to the active directory or LDAP compliant directory Services.

The profile properties can also be mapped to Application entity fields exposed by business data connectivity.

Here, you are able to create a new user propery and new section.These details can be explained in the next articles.

 

Click New Section link above and you will redirect to the screen given below.

 

Here, type a display name for the section and please select the sub-type of user profiles with which you want to associate this section.

Click OK button and you will be redirected to the main page. You can check the newly created section.

Important

Office 365 SharePoint Online does not automatically synchronize the user profiles with SharePoint Online. We have to visit SharePoint site, then the profile will be synchronized to SharePoint Online during the next scheduled Office 365 directory Service sync.

Conclusion

The above article will help you in understanding the basic topics and how to access SharePoint Online user profile property.

Thanks for reading my article.