Employee Image Management System Database

[fmourtaza]

Hello Folks,

We have got a requirement to create an Image Database for our company employees, for which we are thinking to use CDS as a storage.

Now the image has to be sync from CDS to all the Office 365 Business Applications (AD, Teams, Outlook, Skype for Business, etc).

I have the following 3 questions ? 

1. Would CDS be the right storage for this type of application ? or Azure SQL DB would do ?  
2. Is the employee image stored in the Active Directory ? if so, do we have any possibility (API or similar) to update the image from CDS to AD ? 
3. If the employee image is stored somewhere else - Skype Server or Team Server - here also do we have any possibility (API or similar) to update the image from CDS to the application where the image is stored  ? 

Any other approach are welcome.

Thanks in advance. 

[EricRegnier · Accepted solution]

Hi @fmourtaza,

Although CDS can supports images, CDS is best to manage business data and applications. I would rather recommend looking at Azure Blob Storage as your image database/repository. It would be much cheaper in terms of licensing and cost. Azure Blob Storage also has an out-of-the-box connecter for Power Automate to automate your workflows. Here are my quick answers to your questions:

1. As per my comments above
2. From what I know AAD images are stored in AAD. A simple method to update the images is via Power Automate with the O365 connector. Here's a template: https://us.flow.microsoft.com/en-us/galleries/public/templates/514fe3a191cd47d5ac0ab273cbf0a773/upda...
3. Skype For Business and Teams images uses Office 365/AAD images so they would all be updated at once.

Hope this helps!