So, let's have a look into the profile update and the product details of the user profile sync. The good part is, the most important user profile data is available in the products automatically. These tasks are running in the background and Microsoft manages them. Customers don't need (and cannot) do anything. Now, Microsoft is doing that in the background with sync services for each Office 365 tenant. Since this is caused by the product's history, when they were "islands", the trick is that the central user profile gets synchronized to the different product stores automatically. For example, Exchange stores user properties in the user's mailbox, SharePoint is using it's own SQL database, Skype gets data from Exchange, Yammer from AAD, and so on. Automatic synchronizationÄepending on the Office 365 product, there are multiple stores for the user identity. Once logged in, users benefit from Single-Sign-On (SSO) experience with one single identity.
All Office 365 products require such a user identity for sign-in. Once a user is created in AAD, there are a bunch of user properties available, as the User Principal Name (UPN, which is the login name), the person's name and address data, Office 365 licenses, and more. Entities can be managed in the Office-Portal, with scripts (PowerShell, etc.) or custom code (accessing the Microsoft API's), or in a hybrid scenario with AAD Connect or ADFS. The basis of all Office 365 services is the central Azure Active Directory (AAD) that stores all users, groups, licenses and relations of an Office 365 tenant (*.).
So, we at atwork thought that it makes sense to inform about the current user profile status in Office 365 with this article. Since the Office 365 products do have a history, there are different places where user profile data is stored and how specific properties are synchronized. Office 365 users often ask about user profiles in various Office 365 services and where to change what.