User Profiles in SharePoint 2013 (part 2) - A Custom Profile Property and Subtype in Action - Organization Profiles

2. A Custom Profile Property and Subtype in Action

Having completed the steps in the previous two sections, you should now have a new custom user profile property added, and you have contained this custom property in a new Contractor subtype. The following steps show the subtype and custom property in action:

1. Navigate back to the User Profile Service Administration page.
2. Click the Manage User Profiles link.
3. For the sake of demonstration, I will create a new user profile by hand.
4. Click the New Profile button.
5. Figure 3 shows the new user profile form.

   

   Figure 3. Create a new User Profile page

6. Notice the combo box at the top of the page that allows you to change the subtype—select the new Contractor subtype.
7. Changing the subtype to Contractor exposes the new property you added a few subsections back, and thus defines this user profile as type Contractor.
8. Scroll to the bottom of the page to see the new custom property.

Organization Profiles

SharePoint 2007 managed organization staff hierarchy via the Manager property of the profile, which was a property of type Person. The main limitation of this approach is that it does not provide much flexibility to arrange an organization chart. For example, if you reported to multiple managers, or you were not the manager of your direct report, or if you had managers with multiple roles, then the organization chart became unmanageable in SharePoint 2007. The Organization Profile feature of SharePoint 2010 and 2013 User Profile Service aim to remedy this issue with better control over the organization structure.

Organization profiles work in a similar vein to user profiles. Within the User Profile Service Admin page, you should see three links: Manage Organization Properties, Manage Organization Profiles, and Manage Organization Subtypes.

Following are some points worth noting about organization profiles:

• Every organization profile may define one or many leaders
• Every organization profile may include one or many members
• All direct reports of a leader may be members automatically
• Every organization profile has a mandatory parent person or group
• Correct management of your organization chart in SharePoint allows users of your sites to see a graphical org chart