The User Profile service in SharePoint collects personal information for each person with an account, such as a picture, their department, and their colleagues. This information is made available to others via the person's My Site. It also enables social computing features on My Site, such as social tagging and newsfeeds. The User Profile can be synchronized with information in directory services applications such as Active Directory Domain Services. The information can be targetted to specific audiences.
Because User Profile is linked to My Site and ITS is not offering the My Site capability at this time, User Profile will also not be offered. The reasons for this are similiar to those for not offering My Site:
- Privacy concerns. We need to consider how sharing information with User Profile and My Site fits into the current privacy laws and formulate appropriate policies around it.
- Support and training. It is unclear how much support people will require to use the User Profile. ITS does not have adequate support resources at this time.
- Connection to directory services. User Profile can be configured to have connections to current directory services applications. The amount of effort that it will require in unknown. The University needs to review the existing directory services and which information should be sychronized with the User Profile.
- Population of user information. User profiles identify connections among users such as common managers, workgroups, group membership, and sites. User profiles also contain information about areas that a user is interested in and help users locate subject matter experts for a particular area. While this would be useful, it is unclear who would enter the initial data and who would keep it up to date.
