The scheduled retirement of Delve on December 16, 2024, meant that Microsoft had to create a new way for users to update their profile settings. The new method has now appeared in Microsoft Search, and it will spread to other workloads (like OWA) where users can access and update their profile. The new mechanism is welcome, but it’s still too difficult to customize user profiles within a tenant.
The Delve browser app retires on December 16, 2024. It’s time to check if the change will affect how people interact with user profiles in Microsoft 365 tenants. A new “user profile experience” is due to arrive in November that should allow people to update details in their profile. Hopefully, the new experience will include photo updates, which have long been a problem area for Microsoft 365 apps.
This article describes how to use the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK to customize the user account properties shown by the Microsoft 365 user profile card. Previously this was possible using a Graph API request to the beta endpoint. Now everything is in production and Graph SDK cmdlets are available to make customization a tad easier.
The Microsoft 365 profile card (for OWA initially) lists the set of connected Viva Topics for a person. This only happens when the user has a Viva Topics or Viva Suite license. It’s an example of how Microsoft is building out the set of information available in user profile cards and embedding Viva Topics in as many places as possible. All good if you use Viva Topics!
Teams now displays People Insights on the User Profile card. The insights come from LinkedIn and Viva Insights and are intended to keep people informed. The user profile card already includes lots of information and it’s debatable whether knowing when birthdays come around for your LinkedIn contacts adds much value. As always. beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
The Active Directory schema includes a drink attribute. This didn’t make the transition to Azure AD, but you can use one of the custom attributes to make drink show up on Microsoft 365 profile cards. This might not seem like a good use of your time, but it’s actually an illustration of how to put the Microsoft Graph Explorer tool to good use.
Microsoft announced that Office 365 tenants can customize the user profile card, which is nice. The only thing is that an update to the Microsoft Graph is done to apply the customization. Most tenant administrations probably aren’t literate with Graph programming, so that presents a problem. Until you realize that the Graph Explorer can be used to do the job without you needing to write a single line of code.