Prevent users to change profil photo

[Harry Dubois]

I want to prevent users that they can change the company's profile picture, but I cannot find the solution on the web. I have tried several solutions, but still is the user capable to change the profile photo... What is the best solution for it?

For example: this is not working for me:

http://www.msexchange.org/kbase/ExchangeServerTips/ExchangeServer2013/OutlookOWA/prevent-users-chang....

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Set-OWAMailboxPolicy applies only for OWA and users can able to change their photos from other O365 services. Also this policy will take effect after 60 minutes,

[#3]

It could be great to have an Azure AD policy to manage this ^-^

[#4]

Thanx Santhosh. So there is no 'tenant-setting' to prevent users from editing their profile photo? Running the same PSscript every month? 🙂

[#5]

Did not know there was a delay from 60 minutes. Testuser is not enable to change the picture, also not in his 'Delve' profile. Great!

[#6]

Hi Harry,

You do not need to keep doing this every month. 🙂

When you run Get-OwaMailboxPolicy | Set-OwaMailboxPolicy -SetPhotoEnabled $false without defining an Outlook Web App Policy by using -Identity parameter, it disables the feature for all Outlook Web App Policies in your tenant. Including the default Outlook Web Access Policy.

If you want to disable the feature for a specific set of users, then you can create a new Outlook Web App Policy, assign it to those who you wish to disable this feature, and then run the command as below.

Get-OwaMailboxPolicy -Identity "OWAPolicy_Name" | Set-OwaMailboxPolicy -SetPhotoEnabled $false

Thank you.

Muditha Chathuranga

[#7]

Thanx Muditha for this additional information!

[#8]

I am curios, what it the reason for this requirement? A lot of effort has been made by software creators like MS to provide users the ability to personalize the systems that they use many hours a day. Why does a company think that allowing their staff to change a photo is a bad idea?

[#9]

Mmm...Dean, I agree with your comment when we are talking about an enterprise customer or event a government one...but for education (Harry's case) the scenario is a little bit different

[#10]

Hi Dean,

Good question.

One reason as I see is, to maintain a standard across the organization. The photo you're uploading to your social media profile page may not be the most appropriate for your work environment. So, to maintain a standard across the organization, the IT and HR departments can work collaboratively and upload a standardized photo, and then they can disable the ability change the photo by the user to avoid any conflicts.

Although it is true that software vendors create services with many features, specially cloud solutions such as Office 365, they do not make customized versions for individual customer. You may find features you like and features you don't like. But, that doesn't mean you have to use the product with all the features that comes right out of the box. Instead, creators have made it possible for the customer to disable features that they do not want. Also, if there's some feature missing, there's a way of providing your feedback and if there's a high demand, they will implement it. 🙂

Hope this helps you in some way. 🙂

Thank you,

Muditha Chathuranga

[#11]

Juan, thanks again for providing your perspective. I don't have any Edu clients so I frequently forget about that unique set of use cases. I would expect that allowing kids to change their photos could create a lot of problems and preventing this type of personalization would be desirable.
This is just another example of why MS needs to include more admin controls when they initially deploy services. Providing minimum viable products to gather data could be very misleading because many customers will not even try it out if they can't control it.

[#12]

Additional info: we do have an educational tenant and using the profile photo also in our communications to new students and parents. Then it is for me 'logical' to use this company-profile-photo. And... a lot of teachers do not change their profile photo because they are not aware that they can change is ;-).

[#13]

Because companies dont want to see pictures or your dog, or your baby, or your favorite football team etc...

[#14]

Dear Dean,

This question is also opened in our case, and finally we let the Picture profile management to the Users himself but encouraging to respect some HR policy (not place picture of someone else like baby, not place to much holidays pictures, not place logo pictures, etc. ...).

Another case, i can see is to let only one place managing the user profile picture which could be the internal HRIS Application. This is the high level point in our company when the deployment application will be done globally (more than 120 countries and more than 80'000 concerned).

So anyway, i think it could be anyway better to educate the user to explain them what is acceptable and what is not, than block them.

Fab

[#15]

Users perception vs Company perception of a professional photo to promote the company image is a good example.

[#16]

I don't understand why Teams would overwrite the Outlook photo when the policy is set to disallow it. Why even give admins the option to set the policy if the new apps aren't going to respect it. Everything was going swell here until a couple of staff figured this out--now I'm stuck resetting Outlook photos. Yay.

[#17]

Exactly what we face now. People change photos in Teams and they are synced to Outlook/Echange. Nightmare for Enterprise Customers who set standards for profile photos to have a uniform experience.

[#18]

We have a city-wide policy for security reasons...the Office 365 photo and badge photo (that we are all required to wear) must be the same. One group takes the photos so they're consistent. Everyone was onboard. Then Teams came along and changed everything.

😞

[#19]

Just seeking to confirm, is this not possible?

You can prevent it in OWA, however not the rest of the Office 365 portal?

We have a requirement that user's photos are controlled by HR and IT and cannot be changed by users.

It is not ideal to need to regularly reset user's photos via a powershell script if there is no ability to disable the option for users to change their profile photo.

[#20]

The problem is that Teams now allows you to change it and that triggers an overwrite for the rest of Office 365--despite any policy you may have set otherwise.