Thursday, April 24, 2008

SharePoint Customizing Display of Profile Data

We recently took over the management and support of an Intranet site. One of the first things our list to knock is to fix the way profile data is being displayed. A couple of the issues we have are:

  • Users log in with their AD accounts but there are several data elements that need to originate from different data sources.
  • mySites are turned on and we need to fix currently provisioned sites to show this extra data. As well, all new sites need to need to appear correctly.
  • There is also the userdisp.aspx page which displays profile data. We need to make sure that is in sync with data displayed on the mySites.

We did some research and found some really good stuff out there that will help us get this problem resolved.

  • Using BDC to Augment Profile Data – here is a good guide that shows you how to augment data being pulled with the BDC.
  • mySites Redirection – this is a pretty good article that shows how to do redirection of the userdisp.aspx to the mySites page. We are not going to take this approach but worth noting.
  • Customizing mySites 1 and customizing mySites 2 – both of these are really solid articles that provide similar approaches for overriding the presentation of mySites. Both entail Feature Stapling to existing sites and using FeatureSiteTemplateAssociation for new sites. This helps get around not messing around with the Microsoft owned site template.
  • Customizing User Information Page – this is a three part series on how to modify the userdisp.aspx page and customize it.

Between all of these you should be able to construct a good end-to-end solution to override and display of profile data.

Also take a good look at this Code Plex Project. Really cool.

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