I wanted to find a way to have user pictures show up automatically in Users' Profiles without having them to individually upload their personal picture or corporate mug shot.
We essentially had a couple of options:
- Storing the pictures in our CRM application
- Storing the pictures in our HR Management application
- Pointing to a picture repository in AD.
One more thing, once rolled-out this had to be maintainable by HR and the users themselves.
After doing a bit of research, our CRM application did not provide for a picture storage or mapping funtionality. We could customize it but...
Our CRM application publishes employees information back to the HR Management application...
Our HR Management application caches the pictures locally into the logged on user's cache (the HR person's cache), so not good.
Now, Sharepoint imports User Profiles from AD, so this seemed like the best option. So how do we go about it?
I found these 2 excellent blog posts that got me going:
http://blog.henryong.com/2007/02/21/importing-user-pictures-from-active-directory-to-moss-2007/
and
http://paulhorsfall.co.uk/archive/2007/07/13/Unable-to-Configure-MOSS-Property-Import-Mappings.aspx
Now that I had the means, our corporate policy does not allow administrators to edit custom attributes. I'm still working on getting access so I'll be back to update...
