Add a Metadata Property to User Profiles in SharePoint 2010

In this example, our pretend company has decided it would be beneficial for the culture if employees knew how to better work with and relate to each other as they take on and complete projects. To do this, the company decided to focus on a strengths-based culture, to better allow each person's passions drive them to success. One of the methods used to help employees know their own strengths and the strengths of others was having each individual take the Clifton StrengthFinders assessment, to discover their top five strengths. Knowing employees were going to be taking and completing the assessments, the leaders at the company would like each individual to be able to populate their user profile on SharePoint 2010 with these strengths.

Within SharePoint 2010, the list of strengths were added to a Managed Metadata Term Store, so that the spelling and usage of the strengths would be consistent across all of the user profiles as shown below. If you're looking for other directions and helpful resources for any version of Sharepoint, look for various sharepoint consulting services online to see if you can find assistance for any of your queries.

The following are the steps that would be used to add a property to each person's user profile so that they could assign terms from the Strengths Term Store, and show them on their individual profile.

Create the User Profile Property

Open SharePoint Central Administration, and access the User Profile Service Application by following these steps:

1. Under Application Management, click Manage service applications
2. Find the desired User Profile Service Application in the list, and click to highlight it
3. Click Manage in the Ribbon

On the following page, under People, click Manage User Properties:

On the Manage User Properties page, click New Property.

In the first section, provide the desired Property Settings. In this example, we will choose the name of "CliftonStrengths", and the Display Name of "Strengths". We will choose a multi-value string, with up to 150 characters. The last field maps the property to the managed terms that were previously created in the Term Store.

For the Sub-type of Profile, make sure the profiles are selected that you would like to display the property on. In this case, we only have the Default Profile:

Under User Description, we will provide a description that will help people understand what the intended purpose of the property is for as they are editing their profile:

For the Policy Settings, we will choose Required for the Policy Setting, and default the visibility to Everyone.

For the Edit Settings section, we need to make sure we allow employees to edit the property's values:

On the Display Settings section, we need to show the property on the user profile page. We also need to allow the property to show up to 5 values before being shortened with an ellipsis. To be able to edit the field, we need to allow the property to be shown on the Edit Details page. We also will allow updates to the property to show in the newsfeed.

After these values are set, click OK to create the new user profile property.

Move to the Desired User Properties Section

As shown in the last step, the new Strengths property will be displayed under a section called "Custom Properties". We want to change this so the property shows in the "Details" section. To do this, click the blue "up" arrow next to the name of the property until it is in the desired section.

Edit the User Profile

The property is now ready to be used on the SharePoint user profiles. Navigate to your profile, and click "Edit My Profile":

Scroll down to the "Details" section, and either type or select the five strengths to be listed on the profile:

Click Save and Close.

Then, on the user profile click the link titled "More Information":

The user profile should then show the "Strengths" property, with the selected strengths for the individual.