OneDirectory News

Every Microsoft 365 tenant is full of things that aren't people. Room mailboxes, shared inboxes, scanner accounts, service principals, and random accounts called "svc-backup-001" and "gregtest."

They sync into your employee directory and clutter it, and it's time consuming to manually hide the ones you don't want to show.

Now, OneDirectory automatically classifies every profile as either a person, a guest, or a service account, using a weighted set of signals. Guests are now read from Entra's actual userType, so guest and external are finally separate things.

You'll see this first in the Console people list, which now has People, Guests, and Service Accounts tabs at the top, each with a live count. The profile type also shows in the side pane next to the name when you open a profile.

The bigger change: classification and visibility are now separate 🥳 What an account is and whether it shows in the directory are two different questions, and you control both on the Manage tab of any profile. Profile type shows what the classifier decided, and you can untick Set automatically to override it.

The employee directory is built for your people. The Console is built for the admins who run it. Today it gets a People section: every profile in your directory in one list, with a side pane for the one you've selected. All admin editing now happens here.

See everyone, split by account type

Separate tabs for People, Guests, and Service Accounts, each with a live count, so guest and service accounts are no longer mixed in with your employees.

Find people fast

Search by name, then filter and sort any column to narrow down by job title, office, department, or anything else. A visibility column on every row shows which accounts are hidden from the directory.

Open any profile in the side pane

Select a person and their full profile opens alongside the list. Fields are grouped into sections like Identity Information, Job Information, Org Structure, and Connections, with a Grouped / Alphabetical toggle that remembers your choice. Their profile link is right there to copy.

There's also a Manage tab on every profile, for controlling how a profile is classified and whether it shows in the directory. More on that in a separate update.

Quick actions on every profile

Each profile has a quick actions menu (the three dots at the top right): open the person in the directory, copy their profile link, or jump to them in the org chart. And one of our favorite new features: open their account directly in Microsoft Entra or the Microsoft 365 admin center.

Edit anything, in place

Every field is editable directly in the side pane, and each field type has its own editor rather than a generic text box: text, number, URL, checkbox, dropdown, multi-select, dates, birthday (day and month), and hire date.

The more complex fields have their own controls. Photos support drag-and-drop upload and removal. Manager and other people fields are people pickers. Country shows flags. Office and department pickers show thumbnails, so you're choosing something you recognize rather than a name in a list.

👉 People is live now for admins and directory editors. It's the biggest piece of the Console so far. Go have a look, and tell us what's missing.

Edit Mode is retired. Admin editing now happens in the Directory Console.

Instead of flipping the employee directory into an editable state, you now get a surface built for the job: a full people list, a side pane for every profile, and every field editable in place. You can also edit offices and departments, and your own org units.

Where the Edit Mode toggle used to be, you'll now find Edit in Console. It's context aware, so it opens on whatever you were already looking at.

This update only affects admins and directory editors. If you don't have editing permissions, nothing changes for you. You can still edit your own profile in the directory, if enabled.

This is part of a bigger move to make the Directory Console the single place to manage your directory. There's more in there than just editing, and it's all live today. We'll cover the rest soon.

Custom Fields is now available in Early Access for select OneDirectory customers.

We’ve been testing it with a small group of teams and are now opening access to a few more customers ahead of the general release.

With Custom Fields, you’ll be able to add the extra profile information your organization needs, beyond the standard Microsoft 365 fields, so your directory better reflects how your company works.

Interested in trying it early? Reach our to your OneDirectory account manager or our support team.

Directory Console™ is a new home for OneDirectory admins to configure and monitor their directory. From one place, you can manage settings, fields and org structure, members and roles, data sources and filtering rules, and view directory health.

With Profile Completeness, you can now track coverage across key profile fields so it’s easy to see where data is missing in your Microsoft 365 profiles.

Fields and Structure now shows coverage for every synced field, helping you spot Microsoft 365 profile fields that may need improvement. It also shows which fields are synced from Microsoft 365 and which are stored in OneDirectory.

Directory Snapshot gives you a quick view of the accounts in your directory and their visibility settings. It also shows your org entities, including offices, departments, and any custom organizational units.

Sync Status lets you monitor your directory sync by showing when we last polled for changes (happens hourly) and when the most recent updates were imported into your directory. You can also view this information, and more, in Data Sources.

Directory Console is launching in v1, with more features on the way soon 🚀

Up until now, OneDirectory synced with Microsoft 365 twice per day, roughly every 12 hours. We’ve upgraded the sync to run hourly and incrementally, importing only what's changed.

What this means: updates you make in Microsoft 365, like profile details, reporting lines, and other key fields, will now appear in OneDirectory within the hour.

A small set of fields (including photo, birthday, and aboutMe) don’t support change tracking, so they’re refreshed once per day (every 24 hours). If any other tracked field changes in the meantime, these fields will also be pulled through as part of that hourly sync.

You can see each field’s sync schedule in Fields & Structure in the new Directory Console.

Big news for small screens! We’ve redesigned OneDirectory for a better experience in mobile web browsers.

The new layout is cleaner, faster, and more intuitive, with streamlined navigation and improved readability across the mobile experience.

Profiles, offices, departments, and search results now adapt beautifully as you browse, making everything easier to access and explore wherever you are.

To access the mobile view, simply log in to your OneDirectory in your mobile web browser.

Let us know what you think!

Two big upgrades to the icon selector in field settings 🎊

1️⃣ More icons!

We’ve expanded the set to 200 hand-picked icons you can use when creating organizational units and, soon, custom fields.

2️⃣ Better organization

Icons are now grouped into four tabs - People, Places, Sectors, and Symbols - making it much faster to find the icon you need.

When you choose an icon for an org unit (and soon, for a custom field), it’ll appear across OneDirectory - in profiles, the sidebar, search results, and more - making your structure clearer and easier to navigate.

In November, we made strong progress on our upcoming custom fields feature and kicked off a major upgrade to our Microsoft 365 sync - both updates we’ll be sharing with you soon!

We also released profile photo editing in OneDirectory and, as always, shipped a number of smaller improvements and bug fixes. Here are some of the highlights:

✍ In Settings, inactive fields now show in a separate list at the bottom of Fields & Structure, to make it easier to see which fields are currently active.

📑 Improved automatic pluralization of field names

✨ There's now a Field Type column in Settings > Fields & Structure so you can see if it's a text field, dropdown, multiselect, people picker etc.

🎉 Field settings received several UI refinements, including vertical separators, improved column widths for better structure, and clearer labels. We also introduced a new DateYear control type and fixed a number of field-settings-related bugs.

🐛 Fixed a bug with hidden accounts not appearing in search results when in edit mode, if you're an admin or directory editor.

You can now edit your profile photo directly on your OneDirectory profile!

As long as the Photo field is set to editable, you can switch to edit mode and upload a new photo or replace your existing one right from your profile.

Directory Administrators can edit anyone’s photo too. To make the photo field editable for your teams, head to Settings > Fields & Structure and choose the Photo field to adjust its edit settings.

We’ve also fixed a small bug that sometimes caused profile photos not to refresh right away, even when synced from Microsoft 365.