Employee Details. Solution Overview

Introduction

A name in a directory is rarely enough. Before a call, a new hire wants to know who a colleague is, who they report to, what they are good at and whether this is a good time to reach them. Managers, HR and project leads need the same context — and employees want a place where they can keep their own information up to date without opening a ticket.

Vitextra Employee Details is a web part for SharePoint Online that turns this into a single personal page for every employee. It reads the data your organization already maintains in Microsoft Entra ID and Microsoft 365 through the Microsoft Graph API — contact details, manager and direct reports, presence, calendar availability, documents and more — and lets employees edit their own skills, languages, social accounts and other profile sections. There is no separate employee database to maintain.

This article gives an overview of what the web part does and how its parts fit together. For step-by-step setup instructions, see KB50029. How To Add and Configure the Employee Details Web Part; for a walkthrough aimed at end users, see KB10280. Employee Details: A Quick Guide for End Users.

The profile header

The top of the page is a header with the employee's photo, name, job title and contact details. Next to the photo, the header shows live information that helps you decide how and when to get in touch:

• Presence — the employee's Microsoft Teams presence: Available, Busy, Do not disturb, Away or Offline.
• Out of office banner — when the employee is out of office, a banner with the out-of-office message is shown.
• Years with the company and anniversaries — a badge with the length of service, and badges that count down to the next work anniversary and birthday.

A row of quick actions completes the header:

• Chat in Teams — starts a Microsoft Teams chat with the employee.
• Copy link to profile — copies the address of the employee's page.
• Save contact (.vcf) — downloads the employee's contact card that can be imported into Outlook or a phone.
• QR business card — shows a QR code that adds the contact when scanned with a phone camera.
• Open Employee Directory — opens the page with Employee Directory, if the administrator has specified it.
• Back — returns to the previous employee after you navigated to a manager, a direct report or a colleague.

Overview tab and cards

The Overview tab collects the information people look for most often in cards. An administrator can show or hide each of them.

Tabs

Next to Overview, the page can show up to eight more tabs:

• Documents — the documents the employee authored most recently, with the actions to open the containing folder and copy a link to the file.
• Projects, Education, Awards and Certificates — the sections of the professional profile that the employee maintains.
• People — the colleagues the employee works with and the external contacts they communicate with, as determined by Microsoft 365.
• Activity — the SharePoint site pages the employee edited most recently.
• Insights — documents shared with the employee, trending documents and documents the employee used, as calculated by Microsoft 365.

Self-service profile

Employees keep their own page up to date. On their own profile, an edit button appears on the cards and tabs they can change:

• Skills — name and proficiency level (Elementary, Limited Working, General Professional, Advanced Professional, Expert).
• Languages — the language and the proficiency level for reading, speaking and writing.
• Social accounts — the service and the user name.
• About me, interests, responsibilities, past projects and schools.
• Projects, education, awards and certificates.

For skills, languages and social accounts, the employee also chooses the audience of every item: only the employee (Me), the Organization or Everyone.

Changing job title, department and other core data

Most core properties — job title, department, company, office, phone numbers and address — can be changed in Microsoft Entra ID only by an administrator. For this case, the Details card can offer a Request a change button. The employee picks the property, enters the new value and an optional comment, and the web part sends the request, together with the data of the employee and the manager, to an approval flow that your administrator has set up in Power Automate (or to any other web address that accepts a request). The button is shown only when the administrator has specified the address of the flow.

Navigation between employees

When the Navigation option is on, the names in the Manager, Direct reports and People sections are links. A click opens that employee's page in the same web part, without leaving the SharePoint page, and the Back button returns to the previous person. The address of the page changes with every employee (?user=<user principal name>), so you can copy it and send a link to any profile. The same address can be used from any other place, for example from a link in a news post or from Employee Directory.

Configuration for administrators

The web part has no separate database or admin portal — everything is configured in its property pane on the SharePoint page:

• Which employee is shown — the current user (for a personal page), a specific user, or the employee taken from a query string parameter (for a profile page that serves everybody).
• Columns — which attributes the Details card shows, in which order and under which caption.
• Custom attributes — Microsoft Entra ID extension attributes (extensionAttribute1…extensionAttribute15 or extension_<appId>_<name>) and SharePoint user profile properties, shown after the standard attributes.
• Behavior — navigation, the copy buttons, profile editing and the export to a business card (.vcf).
• Integration — the address of the Employee Directory page and the address of the approval flow for change requests.
• Elements, cards and tabs — a toggle for every element of the page: presence, out of office banner, anniversaries, local time, free/busy, profile completeness, link and QR code buttons, each card and each tab. Everything is on by default.
• Appearance — whether the employee's name is used as the web part title.

The loaded employee is also published as dynamic data, so other web parts on the page can connect to it.

Connection with Employee Directory

Employee Details works well together with the Vitextra Employee Directory. The directory helps you find a colleague; Employee Details shows who this colleague is. Specify the address of the page with Employee Directory in the web part settings and the header gets the Open Employee Directory button. The reverse direction works through the page address: a link in the form <page with Employee Details>?user=<user principal name> opens the profile of that person.

Themes and languages

The web part follows the theme of the SharePoint site, including the color variant of the section it is placed in, and supports full-width sections. Dates are shown in the language of the user. The user interface is available in 44 languages, selected automatically from the language of the SharePoint site.

Data and permissions

The web part is built on the SharePoint Framework and runs in the browser of the signed-in user. It calls Microsoft Graph with the permissions that the administrator approved for the solution, and it can never show more than the signed-in user is allowed to see. The data stays in Microsoft 365: the web part does not copy it to a database of its own.

Before the web part can read this data, a tenant administrator must approve the API permissions requested by the solution in the SharePoint admin center:

System requirements