Easily import employee photos into your Active Directory

Letting employees see what others look like adds a more ‘personal’ and ‘human’ touch to email communications. If a company employs thousands of people, it can often be the only way for some people to see exactly who they are dealing with, especially for IT administrators who have to visit individual users at their desks. What’s more, adding users' images to external messages makes emails look more professional and lets customers see who they are corresponding with.

However, Active Directory administrators often find the process of adding photos time-consuming and tiresome, especially if they work in a large, complex Windows network. Managing an Active Directory can be difficult when it comes to controlling users and groups, replication traffic significantly increases as new photos are added and if an organization only uses basic hardware, there might be issues around disk space.

What options are normally available?

• Exchange PowerShell
  This involves writing scripts and requires a deeper knowledge of Active Directory Management than many IT professionals have due to a number of complexities.
• Exchange Management Console (EMS)
  An EMS uses Import-Recipient DataProperty cmdlet commands and does not allow bulk uploads or imports. It also requires you to resize and prepare all image files to meet Active Directory photo requirements prior to uploading them. In the end, this is a very cumbersome option to choose.
• IDirectoryObject and IADsUser interfaces
  These allow you to update Active Directory photos but require creating a Visual C++ application, overcomplicating the entire process.

Batch import photos within moments

With Exclaimer Outlook Photos, you can add literally thousands of users’ photographs to your Active Directory in a matter of minutes by selecting the folder or drive with the images and migrating them all in a single click. There is no need to select individual photos. The software automatically matches each image to names, e.g. matching the user 'Karen Green' with her photo in 'KarenGreen.jpg', or using other AD attributes such as an employee phone number.

By importing employee photos into the Active Directory, you can have user profiles visible in:

• Exchange GAL
• Outlook People Pane
• SharePoint pages
• Lync Contacts

If your photos aren’t the right size, don't worry. The software automatically crops and centers them so you get the right content and the right sized photos. It can even convert them to monochrome if you wish.