Simplifying profile pictures in Office 365 with Hyperfish

An important component of humanising collaboration and communication are profile pictures as they literally give a face to a name.

Profile pictures are displayed in Office 365 in almost all areas where a person’s name is shown:

• Office 365 portal
• Office apps on the desktop (eg. Outlook, Word, Excel, etc.)
• Office apps on mobiles & tablets
• SharePoint Online
• Delve
• Office 365 Groups
• Planner
• Teams
• And so on and so forth…

Knowledge base article 3185286 from Microsoft explains how profile picture synchronisation occurs in Office 365 and the flow between SharePoint Online and Exchange Online – the primary storage locations for profile pictures that all other services depend on.

SharePoint Online picture synchronisation for users who have an Exchange Online mailbox	SharePoint Online picture synchronisation for users without an Exchange Online mailbox

In Office 365 there are a number of areas where profile pictures are stored, all with different size limitations:

The frustration many admins experience is that they may have set up a great system for new employees to have their picture stored in the on-premises Active Directory with a decent resolution, but when it is synchronised to Azure Active Directory for Office 365 the file is crunched down to the 10kb limit. This picture then flows through to all other features of Office 365. As a thumbnail in Outlook or Delve this is ok, but when doing a Skype for Business call without video the profile picture gets stretched out and looks pixelated:

Over the years there have been a number of scripts and apps written to work around the challenges of thumbnail pictures and hi-res pictures, but these are more for administrators to use and are not always effective – especially when a user updates the picture themselves in one location but not another.

Enter Hyperfish – an end-user driven solution for ensuring that Office 365 has the right quality & sized picture in all relevant locations. While it may appear dangerous to put this into the hands of end users, Hyperfish provides administrators with a number of key controls around the quality and appropriateness of picture:

Hyperfish utilises the Azure Face API so if the administrator has chosen to not enabled the “Allow no faces” (as seen in the previous screenshot) and a user uploads a picture of their dog they will be politely declined:

Similarly, if a user uploads a picture of themselves making a face then again they will see the relevant message to indicate that the picture is not appropriate:

Administrators also have the ability to review picture before they are published to the profile:

Hyperfish works with on-premises, hybrid, and pure-cloud scenarios and is charged in bands of users on an annual level.

A free analysis is available for organisations to understand the level of completion across their user profiles which is a great way to start improving the quality of user experiences and interactions.

Also published on Medium.