Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2007 Bible

Designing User Profiles and Memberships

You may want to augment the profiles in the out-of-the-box profile database to suit your needs. Your organization may have specific properties associated with users that, if identified, could be useful in connecting people with similar expertise or skills as well as related job tasks. The complexity of your organizational structure may dictate that you plan ahead when defining or importing profile information—especially because in this version of SharePoint you can import profile information from a variety of sources, including Active directory, other LDAP-based identity management systems, external data defined in the Business Data Catalog, custom sources via the User profile object model, and properties manually created by the administrator and edited by users.

Determining user profile fields

Each user profile contains information about a single user. This profile is a set of name/value pairs that describe the user’s personal information and information related to your organization. This information can be listed, searched, and displayed to other users in your organization. Index Server crawls the user profile store to get available user information.

Information about the people in your organization is stored in user profiles within Profile Services. Profiles Services is managed by the services administrator who has additional permissions not available to Shared Services Provider (SSP) administrators. Administrators for Profile Services ...