Peter Seale's weblog

Monday, August 18, 2008 8:00:15 AM UTC 

When converting an existing "please leave us a comment" form, I had a eureka moment: SharePoint's user profiles are incredibly useful. Let's do this graphically:

Before - ask the user, again and again

After - SharePoint stores user data automatically in the "Created" field

Well, you get the idea anyway

The point of this exercise is to show the power of integration. Specifically, user data like phone, email, work location, department, etc. In an ideal world, SharePoint will pull this data for you from wherever it's stored. HR type data from the HR/payroll system, email from Exchange/AD, and so on. With proper integration you can remove all the pain of online forms; you can completely remove the five "who are you again? and what do you do again? and how do I get a hold of you again?" fields. They're gone; thanks to proper system integration, you already know and don't need to ask these questions again.

Footnote: it's not all gravy

I must acknowledge that there is no easy way to grab and show all this extra data from the user profile without writing code. I wish SharePoint would have made this easier, but alas, 'twas not to be. In the browser, you can certainly click through to see their user profile data, which is good enough for the example above, but that won't always suffice.

Second footnote: user profiles in all their glory require MOSS Standard or better; this is not a WSS-only feature.