To show colleagues on a SharePoint page, the first tool most people reach for is the built-in SharePoint People web part. It ships with Microsoft 365, costs nothing extra, and puts tidy profile cards on a page in a couple of minutes. For plenty of situations that is the right answer. But the moment you think about a whole-organisation directory rather than a single page, the same web part shows its limits. This guide sets out what the SharePoint People web part does well, where it falls short at scale, and how it compares with a dedicated staff directory app.
What the SharePoint People web part is and does
The SharePoint People web part is a native block you drop onto a modern SharePoint page. When you edit a page, add the web part and start typing a name, it looks the person up in your Microsoft 365 directory and adds a card for them. Each card shows the person's photo, job title and contact links, all pulled live from their profile, so the details stay reasonably current without you retyping them.
The key thing to understand is that it is a manual, curated list. You choose exactly who appears by adding people one at a time. The web part does not build a list of everyone in the company on its own; it shows only the named individuals you have added to that page. That design is deliberate: it is meant for featuring a specific, chosen group rather than the entire workforce.
The genuine strengths of the SharePoint People web part
It is easy to be dismissive of a free built-in tool, but that would be unfair. The People web part has real advantages.
- It is free and native. There is nothing to buy, install or approve. If you can edit a SharePoint page, you can use it today.
- It is genuinely simple. Add the web part, type a few names, republish. There is very little that can go wrong, and no configuration to learn.
- It stays reasonably fresh. Because the cards read from Microsoft 365 profiles, a new photo or a changed job title flows through without you editing the page again.
- It suits a small, hand-picked group. A leadership team, a project group, a "meet the team" panel on a department page: these are exactly what it was built for.
If your need is "show these particular people on this page", the built-in web part answers it neatly, and reaching for anything more would be over-engineering.
Where the SharePoint People web part struggles at organisation scale
The trouble starts when people try to turn the People web part into a company directory. It was never designed for that, and the gaps show quickly.
- Everything is manual. You add each person by hand. For a team of eight that is fine; for a workforce of hundreds it is unworkable, and it goes stale the moment someone joins, leaves or moves team.
- There is no automatic company-wide list. The web part will never show "everyone" on its own. If you want the whole organisation, you would have to add every single person by name and keep that list current forever.
- There is no unified search. Visitors cannot type a name or a role and search across the organisation. They can only see the fixed set of cards you placed on that page.
- There are no department or office filters. You cannot narrow the view to, say, everyone in Finance or everyone in the Manchester office, because there is no live, filterable list underneath.
- There is no presence. The cards do not show whether a colleague is available, busy or away right now.
- There is no org chart. The web part does not follow reporting lines, so you cannot see a person's manager or their direct reports from their card.
- There are no celebrations. Birthdays and work anniversaries are not part of it, so it cannot double as a way to help people feel recognised.
None of this makes the web part bad. It simply means it is a page component, not a directory, and asking it to be a directory is where the frustration comes in.
The SharePoint People web part versus a dedicated staff directory app
A dedicated staff directory app starts from the opposite premise. Instead of you choosing who appears, it presents your people automatically and gives everyone the tools to find each other. Glow Cloud Directory is one example: it is an SPFx web part for SharePoint Online and Microsoft 365 that shows your organisation as live contact cards, with the search, filtering and presence the built-in option leaves out.
Here is how the two compare on the points that matter at scale:
- Building the list. The People web part is manual, one name at a time. A staff directory app draws on your Microsoft 365 people directly, so you are not maintaining a list by hand.
- Finding someone. The web part has no search. Glow Cloud Directory offers instant, debounced search across name, job title and department, plus filters for department and office location and an A to Z jump bar to move through a long list quickly.
- Contacting someone. Both show a photo and contact links. Glow Cloud Directory uses a Fluent person card with a Teams chat deep link and a video call, and shows real-time Teams presence (available, busy or away), cached for roughly 60 seconds.
- Seeing the structure. The People web part has no reporting lines. Glow Cloud Directory adds an org chart, showing a person's manager and direct reports, loaded on demand through a single Microsoft Graph batch call.
- People touches. The web part has none. A directory app can add opt-in birthdays and work anniversaries, and self-service "Your info" custom profile fields so staff can keep their own details right.
- Governance. Glow Cloud Directory excludes guest users by default and lets administrators export and import the configuration as JSON and the exclusion list as CSV, which is helpful when you are managing a real, tenant-wide list rather than a handful of cards.
On privacy the difference is worth noting too. Glow Cloud Directory asks for 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, so no directory data leaves your tenant.
When each one is the right choice
This is not a case of one option beating the other; it is about matching the tool to the job.
Use the built-in SharePoint People web part when you want to feature a specific, small group on a specific page. A leadership panel, a project team, a "your local contacts" block on a regional site: the web part is free, native and perfectly suited to this. Adding a paid app for a handful of curated cards would be needless.
Choose a dedicated staff directory app when you need a searchable, tenant-wide people hub where anyone can look up a colleague by name, role, department or office, see whether they are free right now, message them in Teams and walk the reporting structure. This is the point at which the manual web part stops keeping up, and a purpose-built directory like Glow Cloud Directory earns its place.
Many organisations sensibly do both: keep the free People web part where a hand-picked panel makes sense, and give the whole organisation a proper directory for everything else. For more, see our more guides, including how to create an employee directory in SharePoint Online and, for reporting lines, the SharePoint org chart web part options.
If a searchable, always-current directory sounds like the piece your intranet is missing, Glow Cloud Directory is available from £29 per month per tenant with unlimited users, and you can try it in your own tenant on a 14-day free trial and see how it feels for your people before deciding.