For a long time, customizing the Microsoft 365 Profile Card – the small window that pops up when you click on a name in Outlook or Teams – was a PowerShell or Graph Explorer task. If you wanted to display additional information such as the personnel number or cost center, you had to dive deep into the JSON structures of the API.
That is now changing. Microsoft has introduced a new People Settings section in the Microsoft 365 admin center.
You can find “People Settings” in the “Organization Settings” under Services.
This means that administrators can finally control which attributes are displayed to employees via GUI. But as is so often the case, the devil is in the details: Those who have previously relied heavily on custom attributes now have to rethink.
What’s new?
In the Microsoft 365 admin center, you will now find the “People Settings” section under the settings. Here you can choose which advanced properties should appear on the profile card.
Available fields include, but are not limited to:
- Employee ID
- Cost Center
- Division (Department/Division)
- Role
This is a big step forward for usability, as you no longer have to send complex payloads to the Graph API just to display a standard field.
Standard vs. Custom Attributes
Here we have to differentiate technically. Many German companies have been using the Exchange Custom Attributes (extensionAttribute1 bis 15) for years to map specific data such as cost centers or internal codes. These were often laboriously “hacked” into the profile card via schema extension.
The important thing: The new settings in the admin center don’t access these custom Exchange attributes. Instead, they are based on the native Entra ID (Azure AD) properties or the default resources of the Microsoft Graph (such as CompanyDetail or PositionDetail).
This means that if your cost centers are currently in place extensionAttribute1 , they will not be displayed by simply activating the “Cost Center” checkmark in the new settings. The field remains empty because Microsoft looks elsewhere (in the native attribute costCenter).
Data Maintenance: The Beta Trap
Another technical detail concerns the maintenance of this data. Some of the fields you can now enable in the admin center (such as CostCenter, Division , or Role), are based on graph resources, some of which are still in beta status .
This leads to the curious situation that you can set the cost center to be displayed in the Admin Center, but you don’t have the option to edit this field in the Entra Admin Center or M365 Admin Center.
The solution: PowerShell To populate these fields with data, you’ll need to use the Microsoft Graph PowerShell module. Here is an example of how to set cost center and division for a user:
# Verbindung herstellen (falls nicht bereits geschehen)
Connect-MgGraph -Scopes "User.ReadWrite.All"
# Parameter definieren
$Parameters = @{
employeeOrgData = @{
"costCenter" = "881-22993"
"division" = "IT Operations"
}
}
# Update durchführen
Update-MgUser -UserId "max.mustermann@deine-domain.de" -BodyParameter $Parameters
# Überprüfung
Get-MgUser -Userid "max.mustermann@deine-domain.de" -Property id, displayName, employeeOrgData | Select-Object -ExpandProperty employeeOrgDataTime to clean up
We are in a transitional phase. Microsoft is trying to replace the uncontrolled solutions with custom attributes with standardized graph properties.
For you as an admin, this means:
- Analysis: Check where you currently store important information (e.g. personnel number in ?
extensionAttribute3). - Migration: In the medium term, plan to migrate this data to the native fields (
EmployeeId,CostCenter, etc.). A script can help here to copy the values over once. - Activation: Once the data is in the default fields, use the new “People Settings” to make it visible.
Result
The new “People Settings” are a welcome relief and indicate that Microsoft will soon centralize other settings (such as pronouns or name pronunciation) at this point as well. However, if you have a historically grown Exchange attribute structure, you first have to modernize your database in order to benefit from the new Klick-Bunti world.
