Let's start by doing an introduction to
Microsoft 365 User Profiles. First of all,
what is the user profile? The user profile
is really all of the different properties
or metadata around the user. You have
mandatory properties such as username and
the name of the user which is already
there for every user, but also some
optional ones such as department, manager,
office, phone number, and so on. Now where
is this information stored? It's in fact
stored into three places; in Azure Active
Directory, Exchange Online, and SharePoint
Online. If we look at the diagram, let's
take for example first of all a cloud-only
user. Most of the information will be
inside Azure Active Directory. So
information such as username, password,
department, manager, and really most of
the information on that user. Some
information such as the profile picture is
stored into Exchange Online. SharePoint
Online also has its own user profile where
information gets synced from Azure AD in a
one-way only, and SharePoint Online has
additional information in the profile not
existing into Azure AD such as skills,
About Me, birthday, schools, and so on.
Now if you have a hybrid architecture, as
a lot of enterprises do where as they
still have an Active Directory
on-premises, that is the main source of
profile information, but that gets
synchronized to Azure AD through Azure AD
Connect or other sync engines that you
might be using, but why is the user
profile so important? Why do we need to
take care of it? First of all, a lot of
Microsoft 365 experiences depend on the
user profile. To give you an example, it
lets you have a workflow with manager
approval. Well, flow that you're probably
going to use for that workflow cannot
automatically guess the manager of the
user. It comes from that user's profile.
If it's not in there, that workflow will
fail. Other examples include the your team
calendar, which is based on a common
manager, or the company directory and work
chart where people would go to find your
phone number, find information about what
office are you on, and so on. There are
also a lot of new experiences, which I
will call intelligent as Microsoft calls
them, that depend on your user profile.
For example, a lot of the dove
recommendations on relevant content, all
of this is made better by the information
in the user profile, because it can say,
hey, it looks like everybody from your
department or a lot of people from your
department have read this document in the
past two days. So I'm going to push it to
you because it must be relevant to you, or
similar things like that, all of those
connections enhance those intelligent experiences.