Bill Baer, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft Search Assistant and Intelligence (MSAI)
On the profile card in Microsoft 365, you can find information about users that is stored and maintained by your organization, for example Job title or Office location, but what if you don't know what you don't know? Sometimes what we're looking for can be as simple as a Job title or Office location, but what if the information we need is more complex or outside of the boundaries of Microsoft 365? Often you would need to search across multiple systems and know what systems that information is in. What if you could find all the information about a person, even that information which is unique to your company, right in the context of the person?
This is where customization of people experiences in your organization helps. You can already customize some parts of people experience by surfacing AAD data on your profile cards. However, today we're excited to announce new capabilities in profile enrichment where as an Microsoft 365 administrator you can directly enrich user profiles with information from HRMS systems like Workday, SAP SuccessFactors and more using Microsoft Graph connectors. With these capabilities, you can now find more information you need about a person right in a person’s context, in less time and in fewer places.
Getting started
Enriching Microsoft 365 profiles with third party system data
With new profile enrichment with Microsoft Graph connectors, enriching your profile is possible through few easy steps in Search & Intelligence admin center.
Configure a Microsoft Graph connector to ingest data from systems like SuccessFactors, Workday, and more
Through extending the capabilities of Microsoft Graph connectors to the Microsoft 365 profile, you'll soon be able to ingest data from systems like SuccessFactors, Workday, and more.
While this work is new and coming soon, we'll make a few connectors available initially; however, in the event the system you're using does not have a pre-built connector, we’ve got you covered with Microsoft Graph APIs that allow you to build your own custom connector as well. To learn more visit externalItem resource type - Microsoft Graph beta | Microsoft Docs.
Enrich your Microsoft 365 profile with connector data
The Microsoft 365 Profile API is a set of APIs that provides a rich schema for storing profile data of a user in a tenant. Its entity-based model provides a wide range of entities like accounts, address, educations, interests, skills, projects and many more.
These entities have native semantic depth built-in to support rich profiles– making it easier for everyone to express themselves and be able to contextualize people within the company. These properties are surfaced in shared, people experience across Microsoft 365 and third-party services and experiences via Microsoft Graph.
You can enrich your Microsoft 365 profile data through ‘Customizations’ in the Search & Intelligence admin center. Just jump into the Profile schema management dialog and choose the user properties of the Microsoft 365 profile you want to enrich using configured Microsoft Graph connectors. In addition, you will also be able to choose some of the properties that should be displayed on the user’s profile cards too.
Check out our demonstration video here https://youtu.be/OxeXiw0FwU8.
Limitations
While you can enrich your Microsoft 365 user profiles with data from different third-party systems. There are a few limitations that will be relaxed going forward.
- Not all the user profile properties from the profile schema can be displayed on the profile cards.
- The profile card on which customization is allowed is currently only available for web apps such as Outlook Web App, OneDrive SharePoint, Office.com, etc.
- You cannot create new properties in Microsoft 365 user profile yet i.e. you can only enrich the existing properties.
Call to action
We will be launching a private preview of these features in CY21H2. Reach out to us at peoplecustomizationfeedback@service.microsoft.com if you have any feedback or if you are interested in joining our limited preview.