Using SharePoint user profiles to build a company phone directory

Question

I'm working on a Sharepoint 2007 (MOSS Std) intranet implementation right now, and one of the things we'd like to do is replace the manually-maintained phone directory with the profile information we're importing from AD.

People search is great, but I want to have a big page with all the names and phone numbers of the 150 or so people that work at the company (which means using the People Search webpart with a query hard-coded to return everyone won't work). A few quick searches haven't turned up anything, but this seems like a really common request.

Can anyone help me out? I'm not opposed to buying a reasonably-priced webpart to solve this or writing some custom code, but both seem like they shouldn't be required for such a simple request.

Answer 1

Unfortunately I don't know a commercial solution which do the job but I could think about two custom solutions.

1. Write a custom web part which iterates all user profiles, caches the needed data like name and telephone number etc. and and render this information in a table. As the user data like name and telephone number won't change too often, caching the information for a day should be ok.

2. Write a timer job which pulls the information about the users from the user profiles periodically. The timer job writes the information then into a contact list. The advantage of the list would be that you get sorting and filtering out of the box. The disadvantage would be, that you have the same information in multiple places (user profiles, contact list). But you could exclude the list form search.

Answer 2

Have you tried SharePoint Site User Directory? In MHO, I do not think it provides much significant features compare with build-in SharePoint Web Part called User Directory. As to your requirements, It does provide a feature which allows you check phones employees in you company. The phone number need to be stored in AD though. Just FYI.

Answer 3

It looks like we're going to go with PeopleZen from Roxority. Their basic version will let us show all our employees in a list, sorted by name, and the filter-by-tab feature looks like it'd be great to use with the 'department' field once we get that filled in for everyone. And if we need to get more complex, that FilterZen thing they sell to plug into it looks rather slick.

Just wanted to add this one to the list for people who find this via search engines later.