Employee Directory vs. Organizational Chart vs. Employee Details: Which Vitextra People Product to Choose

Overview

Vitextra offers three products that work with the employee data your organization already keeps in Microsoft 365: Employee Directory, Organizational Chart and Employee Details. All three read people data from Microsoft Entra ID through Microsoft Graph, show photos and Microsoft Teams presence, and run on SharePoint Online pages. They answer different questions, though:

• Employee Directory — "Who is the person I need?" It helps you find people: search, filter and browse a list of colleagues.
• Organizational Chart — "How is the company structured?" It shows who reports to whom as an interactive tree.
• Employee Details — "Who is this person?" It shows one employee in depth on a personal page and lets employees maintain their own profile.

What each product does

Employee Directory is a searchable directory of colleagues. The solution includes three web parts: Employee Directory (people from the SharePoint user profiles through SharePoint search, or from Microsoft Entra ID), Employee Directory (Entra ID) (the complete user list from Microsoft Entra ID with a visual filter editor, exclusions and A–Z navigation) and New Employees (people whose accounts were created recently). Users narrow the list with the search box, the refinement panel and the quick filters My department, My team, People I work with and Favorites, select a person to see a compact profile in the details pane, and can export the results with Export to Excel. See KB10064. Employee Directory Overview: Web Parts, SPFx and Microsoft Graph.

Organizational Chart builds the company hierarchy automatically from the manager attribute of the users in Microsoft Entra ID. In the Entire Company mode it shows the whole organization, and in the Employees reporting to specific user mode only one team, as a horizontal tree or a compact vertical list. Visitors expand and collapse branches, zoom, search, use Find me to locate themselves, and export the chart to PDF or JPEG. See KB10232. Organizational Chart. Solution Overview.

Employee Details builds a full personal page for one employee: the profile header with presence and quick actions, the Overview tab with details, skills, availability, manager and direct reports, and up to eight more tabs such as Documents, Projects and Insights. On their own page, employees edit their skills, languages, social accounts, About me and other profile sections. See KB10279. Employee Details. Solution Overview.

Comparison table

Which product to choose

If you need more than one of these, the products complement each other rather than overlap — see the next section.

Using them together on one intranet

A complete people section of an intranet often consists of three pages, one for each product:

1. A directory page with Employee Directory — the place to search for colleagues. Add the New Employees web part to the home page to show recent joiners.
2. An organization page with Organizational Chart — the company structure, or one chart per department on the department sites.
3. A profile page with Employee Details set to take the employee from the page address. One page then serves every employee: https://<tenant>.sharepoint.com/sites/<site>/SitePages/Profile.aspx?user=<user principal name>.

How the pages are connected:

• In the Employee Details settings, specify the address of the directory page. The header of every profile then shows the Open Employee Directory button.
• The address of the profile page (<page>?user=<user principal name>) can be used in any link to a person: a news post, a team page, an onboarding checklist or a message.
• Add the three pages to the navigation of the site or hub, so that users can move between search, structure and profiles.

What about the built-in Microsoft 365 tools?

Microsoft 365 already helps users find and learn about colleagues:

• People search in SharePoint and Microsoft 365 finds a person by name and other profile information.
• The Microsoft 365 profile card, which opens from a person's name in Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and other apps, shows contact details and the person's place in the reporting line.
• Microsoft Teams shows a person's manager and direct reports as part of their profile.
• The SharePoint People web part shows a list of people that the page author selects by hand.

These tools are often enough when users know whom they are looking for and only need the contact details or the manager of one person. The Vitextra products are worth adding when you need more:

• A directory you can browse, not only search — the full list of employees in the Details or Contact layout, with Group by and, in Employee Directory (Entra ID), A–Z navigation.
• Filtering and refining — the refinement panel by department, office or any configured attribute; the quick filters My department, My team, People I work with and Favorites; search by skills.
• A clean list of real employees — an administrator can restrict the directory with a filter and exclude unlicensed, blocked or incomplete accounts, so shared mailboxes, rooms and service accounts do not appear.
• Export to Excel — the filtered list as a spreadsheet for reporting or sharing.
• New Employees — recent joiners highlighted automatically, with no list to maintain.
• Microsoft Teams with a tenant-wide default configuration — the same directory or chart in the Teams personal app.
• A whole-company chart (Organizational Chart) that can be exported to PDF or JPEG, and a personal page that employees maintain themselves (Employee Details).