Find Your Account with Microsoft Search to Update Your Details

Delve is scheduled for retirement on December 16, 2024. As noted previously, when Delve retires, users need a different mechanism to update their profile settings. Microsoft said that the replacement for user profile updates will be available through Microsoft search and promised that the replacement would be available before the demise of Delve. The option to update user profiles has duly arrived and should now be available in tenants.

The new option hasn’t yet replaced the My Microsoft 365 profile accessed by clicking the user profile photo in the top right-hand corner of Microsoft 365 browser interfaces. I’m sure that this will happen, but in the interim, you’ll need to go to Office.com and search to find your user profile. When you view your profile, you should see the option to Update your profile (Figure 1).

Eventually, the option to update user profile settings should appear in all apps where users can currently view their profile card.

Updating User Details

Generally speaking, updating a user profile is straightforward. Some updates show up faster when people view the user profile than the 24 hours expectation set by Microsoft when saving new values for the profile (Figure 2).

A Mixture of Properties

My issue with the current implementation is that it still surfaces some elements of the old SharePoint profile. For instance, if you click the link to “add more profile information,” you’re brought to the old Edit Details screen. For most tenants, there’s nothing on this screen that cannot be changed with the update profile screen, so I’m unsure what extra value the link delivers. Perhaps it’s to serve tenants who add custom user profile properties to SharePoint Online.

The duplication of some common properties shown on the profile card is more worrisome. Most properties relating to the organizational information stored about users is held in Entra ID, which is the authoritative source for directory information within Microsoft 365. These properties include the job title, department, company name, office location, and business address. They also include contact information like numbers for home, business, and mobile phones.

The issue is that the user profile card displays two sets of telephone numbers. One set are the values stored in Entra ID; the other are stored in SharePoint Online. Users can’t update Entra ID, but they can update their home and mobile numbers in the profile information in SharePoint (Figure 3). Oddly, users can update the business fax information in SharePoint Online, but the equivalent from Entra ID isn’t even shown.

Perhaps the desire is to allow users to publish both official (Entra ID) and unofficial contact details. That could very well be a good idea, if the same names weren’t used. For instance, Figure 4 shows my user profile. There are two values listed for mobile phone and business fax. Entra ID doesn’t store home phone numbers for users, so the profile uses the data from SharePoint Online.

A Missed Opportunity

While acknowledging that the implementation now being rolled out is to assist in the retirement of Delve by replacing how users update profile information, it seems like failing to rationalize the information displayed on the user profile card is a missed opportunity.

Most Microsoft 365 tenants don’t add custom user profile properties to SharePoint Online. The feature is a legacy inherited from the on-premises server that should be replaced by easier customization for user accounts within Entra ID. Given the core position of Entra ID within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, it just doesn’t make sense to persist with a mechanism that, as far as I can tell, isn’t widely used.

You can add custom directory extensions or schema extensions to Entra ID, but using the extensions isn’t as easy as it should be. For instance, there’s no way to customize the user profile card to add custom directory or schema extensions in the same way as supported for Exchange custom attributes. It would be nice if Microsoft made it easy for administrators to create tenant-specific versions of the user profile card and for users to update their details. It’s possible to create and update profile cards today, but pulling everything together is just more complicated than it should be.

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