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I have a Document Library based on a custom content type and I cannot figure out how to grab information from the user profile. The built-in column called "Created By" knows my "full name" based on my identity as logged on to my intranet and hence Sharepoint. How can I leverage this to similarly grab my Manager's Name?

Currently, Manager's Name results in a [data entry] text box. I want to know how to have a column of the content type automatically set to the Manager's Name as determined by the values within the Active Directory (SP user profile).

In workflows, I have an approval workflow which finds the Manager for the WorkflowContext initiator (i.e. "me"). Is there a way to get this value set for a document library item?

In a similar way, I'd like to grab my E-Mail value from the User Profile (rather than the way the Site Column called E-mail just defines a type of "Single line of text" and requires data entry.

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What version of SP? – PirateEric Oct 1 '12 at 23:51
Sharepoint 2010 Enterprise service pack 1 – John Adams Oct 2 '12 at 16:22
I conclude there is no direct method for obtaining Manager's Name (as in AD/User Profile) from a built-in site column (despite the column names offered in the existing site column group "Core Contacts and Calendar Columns". Only the SPD Workflow Action called "Lookup Manager of a User" can do this. – John Adams Oct 15 '12 at 15:35

2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

In SharePoint Designer workflows, you can look up the manager of a user using the Lookup Manager of a User action.

The Created By field stores your account. You can use the Utility actions to extract the username from domain\user and append @domain.com to that and then utilize it as needed. If you simply need the email address to send an email, that is unnessary as you can just stuff the person/group column into the email action and it will just work.

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Thanks PirateEric. I think I was not clear. I know how to get these user profile items via workflow actions; here I'm trying to get these items by means of custom contact type associated with a document library (via customization rather than development). "Created By" is good already but is there any way to get the Manager and Email for "Created By", perhaps from a Computed site column? Again, this is not a workflow. – John Adams Oct 2 '12 at 17:44
up vote 1 down vote

If you do not want to do development, then I would create a simple workflow that uses the workflow action to get the manager's info and then save that to a custom column. The workflow would need to run on creation of a new item, and would set it soon after the record is initially saved.

If this is purely for display purposes, it is also possible to create a dataview web part that takes the field and does a lookup against the user profiles through SharePoint's web services all on the client side to look up the extra details.

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