Customize the Microsoft 365 Profile Card Through the Admin Center

A July 3 LinkedIn post by Microsoft’s Wictor Wilén revealed that the Settings section of the Microsoft 365 admin center now has a People Settings section where tenant administrators and people administrators can customize the properties that appear on the Microsoft 365 people card. Figure 1 shows the properties available for inclusion in the profile card.

No Custom Properties

The thing about the set of properties shown by the Microsoft 365 admin center is that they don’t include any custom properties (the Exchange custom properties referred to by Entra ID as the on-premises extension properties) added to the profile card through the Microsoft Graph. To keep focus, properties ingested from another source, like Copilot connectors for people data, are out of scope for this discussion.

For example, the profile card for my tenant features three custom properties for Employee Id, Employee Type, and Cost Center (see this article about how to customize the Microsoft 365 user profile card with PowerShell). Similar properties are in the list shown in Figure 1, but these are Entra ID properties rather than the custom properties I used.

Two of the properties (EmployeeId and EmployeeType) have been available in Entra ID for several years, but never featured in the set surfaced in the profile card (which is why I used custom attributes)

The CostCenter property is part of the CompanyDetail Graph resource type that’s currently in beta. Looking at the other optional properties listed in Figure 1, we find that the Division property is also part of the CompanyDetail resource, while the Role property is part of the PositionDetail resource, another beta resource.

Because these properties are in beta, you cannot update them for user accounts through the Entra admin center or Microsoft 365 admin center. Instead, you’ll need to use cmdlets like New-MgBetaUserProfilePosition (which updates the Role property), or the Update-MgUser cmdlet to update the CostCenter and Division properties. As shown below, after updating the properties for a user account, the Get-MgUser cmdlet can retrieve the updated values:

$Parameters = @{
  employeeOrgData = @{
   "costCenter" = "881-22993"
   "division" = "CEO Office"
  }
}

Update-MgUser -UserId Tony.Redmond@office365itpros.com -BodyParameter $Parameters

Get-MgUser -Userid Tony.Redmond@office365itpros.com -Property id, displayName, userPrincipalName, employeeOrgData | Select-Object -ExpandProperty employeeOrgData

CostCenter Division
---------- --------
881-22993  CEO Office

Microsoft 365 Profile Card In a State of Transition

The Microsoft 365 profile card is in a state of transition. Some properties come from Entra ID, and some come from SharePoint Online, which can end up in a messy profile card with apparent duplications. Add in some custom properties derived from Exchange custom attributes, and it’s a recipe for confusion.

The good news is that Microsoft is attempting to solve the problem by defining the properties required by Microsoft 365 tenants in Graph resources. If Graph resources include rich descriptions of about people and their roles, then there’ll be no need to use custom properties.

Tenants use custom properties today because it has been the only way to present customized information about people on the profile card. A migration to move values from custom to standard properties will have to occur in the future. For example, my tenant needs to extract values from the custom properties used by the profile card today and transfer the values to the default Graph properties. The transition will be completed by updating the set of properties shown on the user profile card to use the default rather than custom properties. You can download a script from the Office365itpros GitHub repository that demonstrates the general principle.

More Settings for the Microsoft 365 Profile Card to Come

The big expansion of the People Settings section in the Microsoft 365 admin center needs to be filled with more than the single option to customize the people card. I expect that Microsoft will use the page to present all the settings that affect the profile card, including the display of personal pronouns and name pronunciation recordings. It just takes time to roll these changes out, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see the other settings appear in the Microsoft 365 admin center before the end of the year.

Insight like this doesn’t come easily. You’ve got to know the technology and understand how to look behind the scenes. Benefit from the knowledge and experience of the Office 365 for IT Pros team by subscribing to the best eBook covering Office 365 and the wider Microsoft 365 ecosystem.