Forum Discussion
Automatic initials are taking my business
Hello everyone,
I'm a software developer, mostly based in Germany. I have a M365 Business Account and am using Teams as part of it.
Since automatic initials, instead of generic profile pictures, became a thing, I'm constantly in a hurry to change my profile picture as soon as possible.
This is because my initials are SS, which in the German culture is the abbreviation of the company responsible for the death camps during Nazi Germany.
People are so upset about it that I even had customers not do business with me. They saw the SS initials in calls and thought I was using this on purpose to make a political stand, i.e. being in favour of the industrial scale mass murder of several million people.
I'm not.
So here is where my frustration is with Teams, which I'm paying for, and which is taking my business away with its stupid initials:
- I cant change the initials without changing my name
- I cant populate my picture to outside orgs preventing the initials from being shown
This leads me to the incredibly uncomfortable situation that every time I connect to a new client, I need to discuss my distancing of the genocide 80 years ago before actually being able to commence a meeting. Not a very happy topic and as mentioned before I have lost business because of it.
Is there please, any solution to this, that doesn't involve having to change my name?
Kind Regards
Sebastian
2 Replies
- SebDevCopper Contributor
Hi Jamony,
thanks for your reply. I have set a profile picture, which I will happily share with whoever has my Teams contact details. However, as soon as anybody outside my org is contacting me, or I'm joining a call on their tennants end, the picture will not be shared, defaulting back to initals.
To my understanding there is no way of allowing anyone to see my profile pic, even when outside my organisation. Or is there, and I have not yet been able to find it?
I'm the only user inside my tennant/org, so 100% of my clients see my initials whether I have a profile picture set or not.
Hi, Teams/Microsoft 365 creates initials when no profile photo is available, and I don’t know of a tenant switch to force a generic silhouette instead. The clean workaround is uploading a neutral logo or business image as your Microsoft 365 profile photo, then waiting for Teams cache to refres