Data Governance and the Directory Experience

Note: Applies to Directory Lite (photos) and Directory Standard/Premium (photos and attributes) products. 

When using LiveTiles Directory to manage specific attributes within your organization's employee directory, it becomes important to make sure the ways in which users are able to modify information do not work against you.

For example, with the Office 365 Connector enabled, Directory does a great job of propagating user photos to Active Directory, Exchange online, and SharePoint Online photo stores at optimal resolutions. This harmony is easily disrupted if a user is able to change their profile photo through applications other than Directory, such as Skype for Business. 

The following instructions explain how to best configure the Office 365 experience so that Directory can work as effectively as possible for your organization. 

Profile Photos in Office 365

When a user submits a profile photo with Directory, the photo is resized for the 100kB thumbnailPhoto size limit and applied to Active Directory (96x96). With the Directory Office 365 connector (formerly Hyperfish Office 365 connector) enabled, the connector is notified and resizes the original image to the optimal resolutions for both the Exchange Online (648x648) and SharePoint Online (S 48x48, M 72x72, L 120x120) photo stores, and applies them there instantly without having to wait for the standard photo synchronization (up to 72 hours). 

The ability for users to change profile photos within the Office 365 experience (including Microsoft Teams) is governed by OWA mailbox policies. To disable the ability for users to change profile photos within the O365 experience, create an Exchange Online PowerShell session and run
Set-OwaMailboxPolicy -SetPhotoEnabled $false
applying it to the Exchange Online mailbox policy for the users you'd like to set this for.   

All Other Attributes

1   Sign-in to the SharePoint Online Admin Center (https://contoso-admin.sharepoint.com) and navigate to User Profiles -> Manager User Properties:

2   Edit the property you would like to manage and under 'Edit Settings' uncheck the box labeled 'Allow users to edit values for this property':