An accurate, searchable employee directory in SharePoint Online is one of those quietly essential tools. When someone new joins, when you need to find the right person in another department, or when you simply want to put a face to a name, a good people directory saves time and cuts down on internal emails. The good news is that Microsoft 365 already holds all the data you need. The harder part is presenting it in a way that is genuinely useful. This guide walks through the built-in options honestly, shows you how to build a basic directory, and explains where those options fall short.
Why a people directory matters
Most organisations already store staff details in Microsoft 365: names, job titles, departments, office locations, profile photos and reporting lines all live in Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD). The problem is that this information is scattered. It surfaces in Outlook, in Teams, in search results and in profile cards, but there is rarely a single place where everyone can browse or search the whole organisation. A dedicated directory closes that gap. It helps people connect across teams, supports onboarding, and reduces the reliance on someone who "knows everyone".
The built-in options, and their honest limits
SharePoint Online gives you several ways to show people without buying anything extra. Each has a legitimate use, and each has real limits. It is worth understanding all of them before deciding what you need.
The modern People web part
The People web part lets you add a small set of people to a page and shows their photo, name, title and contact details as neat cards. It is simple and looks clean.
The catch is that you add every person manually. There is no automatic feed of your whole organisation, so it works well for a small team page but does not scale to a company-wide directory. Every joiner and leaver means editing the page by hand.
A SharePoint list of staff
You can create a custom list with columns for name, department, phone number and so on, then use views and filters to browse it. This gives you full control over the fields.
The downside is upkeep. The list is a separate copy of data that already exists in Microsoft 365, so it drifts out of date the moment someone changes role or leaves. Keeping it accurate is a manual, ongoing job, and it will never reflect live details automatically.
Search and Microsoft 365 profile cards
Microsoft Search and the profile cards that appear across Microsoft 365 pull live information straight from the directory. Hover over a name in Outlook or Teams and you get a rich card with photo, title and reporting line.
These cards are excellent, but they are reactive rather than browsable. You have to already know who you are looking for. There is no single page where a new starter can scroll through everyone in the marketing team or jump to surnames beginning with "R".
The Organization Chart web part
SharePoint includes an Organization Chart web part that shows a chosen person's manager and direct reports. It is handy for visualising a single reporting line on a page.
It is narrow in scope, though. It centres on one person at a time rather than giving you a searchable directory of everyone, and it does not offer filtering, presence or celebrations.
A step-by-step for a basic build
If your needs are modest, you can put together a workable directory using the native tools. Here is a straightforward approach.
- Create a new communication site, or choose an existing page on your intranet to host the directory.
- Edit the page and add a section with a clear heading such as "Our people".
- Add the People web part for key contacts or a specific team, adding each person by name.
- For a fuller list, create a SharePoint list with columns for name, job title, department, email and office location, then populate it.
- Configure a filtered or grouped view of the list, for example grouped by department, so the page is easier to scan.
- Optionally add the Organization Chart web part to show reporting lines for a leader or team.
- Publish the page and add it to your site navigation so people can find it.
That gets you a presentable starting point. For a small team, it may be all you ever need.
Where the built-in approach falls short
Once you try to serve the whole organisation, the cracks show. The most common frustrations are:
- Manual upkeep. Lists and People web parts do not update themselves. Every joiner, leaver and role change is a manual edit, and accuracy slips over time.
- No single searchable directory of everyone. The native tools either show a hand-picked few or require you to already know who you want. There is no one place to search or browse the entire company.
- No presence. You cannot see at a glance whether a colleague is available, busy or away.
- No photos in one place. Profile photos exist across Microsoft 365, but the native directory options do not bring them together into a consistent, browsable set of cards.
- No celebrations. There is no built-in way to surface birthdays or work anniversaries, which are a simple way to build a sense of community.
None of these is a flaw in SharePoint exactly. They are just the limits of general-purpose tools being asked to do a specific job.
How a dedicated directory web part solves it
A purpose-built directory removes the manual work by reading live data from Microsoft 365 rather than asking you to maintain a second copy. This is where a tool like Glow Cloud Directory fits. It is a SharePoint Framework (SPFx) web part, currently version 2.0, that you add to a page and point at your own tenant. Because it reads from the directory directly, it stays current on its own.
Glow Cloud Directory shows live contact cards with Microsoft 365 profile photos, and a Fluent person card that lets you start a Teams chat via a deep link or begin a video call. It shows real-time Teams presence, so you can see whether someone is available, busy or away, with presence cached for around sixty seconds to keep things responsive. You get instant, debounced search across name, job title and department, filters for department and office location, and an A to Z jump bar for quick browsing.
It also handles the things the native tools miss. There is an org chart that shows a person's manager and direct reports, loaded on demand through a single Microsoft Graph $batch call. Opt-in birthdays and work anniversaries add a light community touch, and a self-service "Your info" area lets people fill in custom profile fields. Guest users are excluded by default, and you can export or import the configuration as JSON and the exclusion list as CSV.
Privacy tends to be the first question from IT, so it is worth being precise. Glow Cloud Directory uses only three read-only Microsoft Graph scopes, User.Read.All, Presence.Read.All and User-LifeCycleInfo.Read.All (work anniversaries), and runs as the signed-in user. No directory data leaves your tenant; only the licence, tenant ID and billing email are stored. It has no Microsoft Graph Toolkit dependency. It is a Glow Cloud Kit product from Glow Cloud Solutions, priced from £29 per month per tenant for unlimited users.
If you want to compare approaches further, browse our more guides, including our look at Delve retirement and employee directory alternatives and our walkthrough of the SharePoint org chart web part. When you are ready to see a live, searchable directory in your own environment, you can try Glow Cloud Directory free for fourteen days.