The Benefits of Profile Validation & Customizations with Microsoft Flow

[JeremyThake]

I've been in the Microsoft ecosystem since 2003 developing in ASP, transitioning to ASP.NET development and onto SharePoint development. I was an SharePoint MVP for five years before working for Microosft in Office 365 and Azure marketing for 3 years. I currently work as the VP of Product Technology at Hyperfish, a software as a service company that builds products for the Microsoft ecosystem. At Hyperfish we help companies get their profile information complete and up-to-date using AI and chat bot technology.

For many organizations it is important not just to have complete and valid profile information in Office 365, it is critical that employees review this information on a regular basis. For example, there are scenarios where employees may have a job title in Active Directory that is in the valid list of values, but it may not be their current job title. Hyperfish's profile validation feature allows organizations to have an official process for employees to audit their personal information on a regular basis.

Our Hyperbot sends emails to employees on a defined interval to get them to confirm or update their profile information across systems managed by Hyperfish. These systems can include Active Directory, SharePoint User Profiles, Dynamics 365, Workday, PeopleSoft, and other ERP and HRM systems where profile information is stored.

Sending this profile validation email on a regular basis ensures its the responsbility of the employees to keep their profile information compliant. If the employee does not confirm the profile validation email, the Hyperbot will persist in sending emails to them until they do so. Many of our customers have rolled out communication plans and change management procedures to make sure that employees understand the importance of accurate profiles to the business.

Up-to-date Profile Information is Critical

Profile information is used on a daily basis to make all sorts of business critical decisions which can have impact from a legal, regulatory, or even GDPR perspective. When employees have been with the company for a few years, often the profile information that was added for them when they first on-boarded is totally out-of-date.

Over the last two years, we've collected lots of stories around why this profile information becomes out-of-date. Here are a few of the most common ones:

• mobile phone or work phone number has changed, the current value is valid from a formatting perspective, but if dialed would not work or be the wrong person.
• the employee's last name changes due to getting married, they are introduced in meetings with their married name, and employees can't find them as their maiden name is in their profile.
• they have been promoted and their job title has changed, but their profile has their original job title that is valid, but out-of-date.
• their office location is their original office, last month they were rellocated to another floor.

Extending Profile Validation

One such customer wanted not only for the employees to review and confirm the accuracy of their profile, but their manager as well. As with any product service, our backlog has no end of feature ideas from customers. We prioritize based on demands, and this particular feature request was unique.

In December 2017, we released a new feature to allow administrators to modify what email address the Hyperbot emails are sent from. Customers can now use an Office 365 users' mailbox as the sender, this allows for better eDiscovery scenarios for organizations. This feature also meant that we could trigger a Microsoft Flow based on every email sent by the configured mailbox.

The Microsoft Flow would trigger and essentially look at who it was sent to (in the to: field). Then it would do an action to look up the full profile details of that employee. It would then do an action to look up the full profile of the manager of that employee. Finally, it would send an email, with the same body as the email already sent to the employee, to the manager with a subject line tailored to review the employees information.

This short video below shows how this can be done in a matter of minutes. It highlights how powerful Microsoft Flow can be to extend the functionality of products you purchase and also to your own existing business processes internally.

To find out more about Hyperfish, please check out our product videos or get our Hyperfish Lite product that automatically collects and manages profile photos in Office 365 via our Hyperbot.