As I reported on one of my first posts about SP2010, one nice thing that has been implemented within the new User Profile Service Application, is the presence of the Organization Profiles.

I was browsing for some info about it (since today I was discussing on the usage of this component with Marco Rizzi); there is not yet much information around this topic and I came across this post by Peter Gerritsen which reports some nice information.

The whole idea is to have a new type of Profile for “Organizational” needs: Using the Organization Profile (and also beeing able to extend it using Using Sub-types) this feature can be used in order to create several type of organizational aggregations, depending on your company needs. In example: Divisions, Departments or even Legal-Entities (in case of a multi-company group).

 

Main issue when you were implementing this using Moss2007 is that all your hierarchy logic was build around the “Manager” property of users, but: what happen if your manager change job, and your office or department do not have a new manager assigned in time? Or what if a manger have two different role inside two organizations? You’ll end up having a broken/unclear hierarchy.

This component try to address this need.

 

Every organization can have defined who is the “leader” of this organization and who are the members.

Members can be included also by automatically include direct reports of the leader so based on the company hierarchy.

The members could also be associated by ActiveDirectory groups.

 

The nice nice thing about it is… that you will need to develop all the UI and end-user functionality by yourself 🙂

As far as I found so far, currently there is no any impact on the User Profile page and this information, although present, won’t be displayed. Peter in his post refer that MS did not make it to complete this feature since it has many different interesting approaches and evolution path.

As always, what we can do is to leverage on this infrastructure to build our logic if we need to include this type of information. The Object Model exposes all information from the class Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.OrganizationProfile 

As far as I analyzed it. It is currently not that stable yet: some components do not work 100% correctly, but we know it has not been release yet (so there is always time for some bugfixing)

HTH

Alberto