People Directory
The intelligent People Directory that integrates with Microsoft 365 to help you find and contact your colleagues.
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The intelligent People Directory that integrates with Microsoft 365 to help you find and contact your colleagues.
Last updated
Was this helpful?
The People Directory is the component that allows you to have the list of colleagues and their contact information at your fingertips with just one click. The system is fully synchronized with Azure AD, Microsoft's database. Each time the component synchronizes with the corporate Azure AD, it ensures that colleagues' contacts are always available and continuously and automatically updated.
Thanks to the side filters and the dedicated search box, finding colleagues will be even easier and more immediate.
This feature is useful both for quickly finding colleagues' contacts and for getting to know and discovering more about those who work with us every day.
Within this component you are able to do all the following actions:
Search for your colleagues with a free-text search and phone number
Search for your colleagues applying filters
Open the detail pane for every single person to view his/her details
Contact quickly your colleagues via phone (if you have a Voip system), mail or Teams
Navigate your company's structure with the use of the Manager field
View related colleagues
Choose from several data sources
Explore the advantages of Intranet.ai People Directory by clicking here to learn more.
If your page is not already in edit mode, click Edit at the top right of the page.
Click on it and, in the web part search box, enter People Directory to quickly find and select the People Directory web part.
You can customize all the following features of our People Directory:
The fields to view inside each box
The fields to view inside the detail pane of each employee
The field names
The manager field
The field for the Other contacts feature
The filters for searches
Quick actions
See below for more information on each of these options.
People Directory allows you to quickly find your colleagues. Therefore, it's essential to include People Directory details in this section.
If you're not in edit mode already, click Edit at the top right of the page.
Enter the site URL where the People directory list has been installed.
For example: https://intranetai.sharepoint.com/sites/my-hub/
Choose the People directory list.
Then insert again the site URL and choose the People directory favorites list. You need to include this list to enable colleagues to add their preferred contacts to a personal favorites list.
Typically, the People directory and People directory favorites lists are installed on the main site.
How to determine if the lists are on the main site?
Navigate to the home page,
Click on the site settings wheel at the top right,
Select the Site contents option,
Scroll down to see if the list named People directory is available.
If the list is not present, it indicates that the site you are checking is not the correct one.
The People Directory now supports the configuration of cross site lists, so it is possible to have the people list in a site A and use the web part from a site B.
Select the People Directory data source, which can be either SharePoint or Graph. Since a SharePoint list can contain a maximum of 5,000 items, companies with more than 5,000 employees will be required to use Graph as the data source. For companies with fewer than 5,000 employees, the choice will be the SharePoint list of the People Directory, which is synchronized daily with Azure AD contacts.
The Show presence option allows you to show the user's Teams status in his or her card. To activate this option, you just need to select Yes.
To activate the Teams status in the intranet web parts, a few actions in the SharePoint admin center are needed. The SharePoint admin center can be accessed with a SharePoint Admin account. So, you need to take the following steps with a SharePoint Admin account:
Go to https://yourtenant-admin.sharepoint.com/ to access the SharePoint admin center.
Expand the Advanced section in the left-hand menu and click on API access.
In the Pending requests section, you should have the following row: Microsoft Graph - Presence.Read.All.
Select the row and click on Approve at the top left of the page.
When SharePoint is selected as data source, it is possible to choose one or more fields to use for searches. Here you have a drop-down menu showing all the texts fields contained in the People directory list. If no option is selected, searches will be performed on the standard fields: Title, Business Phone, Mobile Phone, Email and User Login Name. If you select one or more fields from the drop-down menu, these will replace the standard fields (they will not be added to them).
Then you need to configure the fields you want to display on the person’s card by clicking on Configure fields.
Then on the first box you choose the field from your Azure AD you want to show.
On the second box, you type the field custom name for that section.
With first flag you choose if you want to show that field in the profile section.
With second flag you choose if you want to show that field in the card details.
Here’s an example of that panel already configured.
Always remember to click Save at the bottom of the page!
Those fields are the same as your Azure AD’s, so you can choose any of them to make visible on the Intranet. Please find here all the screenshots for the configurable features.
The field for the Other contacts feature: this area shows the contacts that have a certain property in common with the selected contact. For example, if you choose to set the Department field for other contacts, the contacts of colleagues who belong to the same department as the person you are looking for will be shown.
Then you need to insert the link to the My Profile page, so once you click on the person’s card you will be redirected to his/her profile
If you want to display a text to this link, you can type it on the Enter the link text in the details tab box.
At last, you can choose how many people you want to show on the page.
On this section, you can choose the order of the people shown.
We suggest you to select Title, so people will be sorted alphabetically, but you can choose to display the contacts from the Azure AD field in the order that you prefer the most.
Here you need to select each box with the options below:
Select the image field from the list where the profile picture is stored: select User Principal Name.
Select the phone number field from the list where the phone number is stored: select Business Phone or Mobile phone.
Select the mail field from the list where mail addresses are stored: select Mail.
Select the field from the list where the manager is stored: select Manager.
Select the field from the list where the username is stored: User Principal Name.
Select the field from the list where the mobile phone is stored: select Mobile Phone.
Select the field where to take the caller's value: this is an optional section, you should select it only if you have a Voip system.
Select the field from the list where the active/is-visible value is stored. We suggest choosing Active, so you can filter only the active contacts of your People Directory list.
Then you need to configure the filters you want to use on your People Directory by clicking on Configure Fields – you can choose up to 6 filters.
The search filters are useful to allow the user to find colleagues they are looking for with just a few clicks.
Here’s an example of that panel already configured.
On the first box you choose the field from your Azure AD you want to show.
On the second box, you type the field custom name for that section.
With the first flag you choose if you want to show that field as a filter.
The second flag you choose if you want to show the filter open by default in the page (open by default means extended).
The filters for searches: it is possible to choose which fields to use to activate the search filters. Filters are not mandatory but are a useful research tool. The Favorites component is set by default in the web part, all other fields are optional.
Always remember to click “Save” at the bottom of the page!
Then you can flag this option if you want to show public infos from My Profile.
If I set the flag to Yes, it means that every time users enter information on their personal profile page and leave the Make visible to colleagues field active, the information they have entered will also be visible in the People Directory, just below the institutional information you have set before.
What is personal profile? Discover it by clicking here.
On this section, you can choose the shortcuts to contact your colleagues:
On the first field, you can choose if you want to show the shortcut to send an e-mail to the person.
On the second field, you can choose if you want to show the shortcut to call the person directly from the Intranet – in that case, you need to have a Voip system!
On the third field, you can choose if you want to show the shortcut to open a Teams chat with the person.
On this section, you can insert a common hyperlink to display on the person’s card.
For example the Organizational Chart.
Insert the link to the Organizational Chart’s page.
Type the text you want to display on the person’s card.
Select the flag if you want to open the contact detail in a new tab.
On this section, you can activate a link to a specific content.
First of all, you need to create a new column on the People directory list to insert a content for each employee. It can be a link to a video, to a presentation, to their LinkedIn or whatever you want.
In this case, you need to insert every content individually to each person and the link will appear on the person’s card.
How create a new column in the People directory list?
Navigate to the home page,
click on the site settings wheel at the top right,
select the Site Contents option,
scroll down to see if the list named People directory is available.
Click on the list then click +Add column, choose a text column and then click Next. Then fill in the column for each colleague.
Then you go back to the webpart and
On the first field you type the text you want to display to the contacts. For example: Find out more!
On the second field, you select the column you just created. For example: Linkedin.
At last, you flag the box if you want to open the contact detail in a new tab.
And this is the result:
On this section, you can choose which field you want to show suggested contacts.
We usually use Department or Manager to create a sort of organizational chart, but the choice is entirely based on your preferences.
For example, if you select Department or Manager, the people who belong to the same department or have the same manager as the user you searched for will be shown as suggested contacts.
With this configuration, badge management has been implemented and it is possible to select these lists to view the user's badges.
Enter site URL, for example: https://intranetai.sharepoint.com/sites/Intranet.
Select the Badge categories list.
Select the People badges list.
The People directory favorites list requires a specific configuration so that users can interact with the list and mark contacts as favorites. To learn how to configure this list, read the dedicated guide. In particular, please refer to the First type of configuration section.
Here are the two types of sources that you can choose for showing your colleagues' information inside the intranet People Directory:
Azure AD - The data source of the component are the users you have on your Azure Active Directory, which performs a synchronization every evening so that every change made to contacts on Azure AD (any new or deleted users, deleted, new fields filled in, deactivated profiles, etc.) is reported automatically in the intranet.
The users who are synchronized are those who have the Name and Surname fields filled in and who are active in Azure AD.
On the first configuration, the People Directory is set up to synchronize all of your Azure AD. So also the "admin" contacts or users external to the studio are displayed on the intranet. To not display these contacts on the intranet, we have two options:
Manually deactivate the contacts you do not want to view from the intranet: it is an activity that you will then have to remember to do manually when add new contacts to Azure AD that you do not want to view on the intranet. To manually deactivate a contact, take the following steps: - Access the People directory list; - Select the contact you want to deactivate and click on Edit; - Scroll down until you see the Active field; - Remove the flag from Yes; - Save.
Create an Azure group (security group or O365 group) containing only the users that must appear in the People Directory. We will set the synchronization only on that group and not on all Azure AD (recommended solution).
SharePoint list - You can manually create a SharePoint list and insert the contacts you want to show on the People Directory, so you will insert yourself all the information needed such as name, surname, mail, phone etc. This option is not updated automatically, so you must remember to always update the SharePoint list in order to show the current and valid information on your People Directory.
The possibility of defining pre-filters in query strings has been implemented, in order to load the People Directory already filtered for specific values.
To use it, the filters on the right must first be configured. After that, just insert the filter name (internal name, eg: Department) and the value into the query string.
It allows you to filter both multiple values of the same filter and multiple values of different filters.
For example: ?Department=HR&Department=IT&Country=Italy
The query string is added to the URL of the page where the People Directory is located.
You can exclude specific users from the synchronization by using a custom field in the SharePoint list. The field must be of the Yes/No type (default value: No) and have the internal name "IAIPDDisableSync".
To create this field, take the following steps:
Access the People directory list.
Click on the gear icon at the top right and select List settings.
Under the Columns section, select Create column.
Enter the following information about the column: - Column name: IAIPDDisableSync - Column type: Yes/No - Default value: No
"IAIPDDisableSync" must be the internal name of the column. After creating the column, you can change the field name to make it more user-friendly.
This feature is useful for a SharePoint list synchronized with Active Directory (AD) that also allows manually added users. These manually added users will not be removed during the synchronization process.
Manually added users might not exist in Entra ID and therefore won’t have a User Principal Name. The User Principal Name field is a key for managing detail links, such as opening a specific user’s profile through the search component. Therefore, when manually adding a user to the People directory list, it is important to provide a value for this field, such as name.surname.
For example, if you add Marco Rossi to the list and he does not exist in Entra ID, you can type marco.rossi in the User Principal Name field. This ensures the user's detail page is opened correctly.
Hover your mouse above or below an existing web part and you'll see a line with a circled +, like this:
Click the Edit button on the left of the web part to open the property pane and set options.
Select the People Directory web part, then click Edit web part on the left side of the People Directory web part.
