Setup Department Profile property as Term Set and Sync back to AD

Question

I have a requirement to allow users to only set their Department via a Locked MMS Termset. Also, whatever the user choose from the Termset should be synced back.

Im trying to see if there is a out of the box way of doing it. Firstly, The best would've been to just use the Default Department profile property, but unfortunately the "User Term Set" option is greyed out (propably because it behaves like a system field of some sort).

Next up, I though about creating a New Department property with a different name and set this property to use a Term set and then Export back to AD. I would then hide the default property in the Edit Page and show this on in the Edit page. What happens now is that everything works as it should, but the default property which shows on the profile home page does not sync back from AD once the New Department property has synced.

I also tried to edit the Profile view page by adding the New Department property I created, but it doesn't show any value (propably because it uses a MMS Term set).

Any advice?

Should I go ahead and createa a custom UserControl to extract the value from the Profile and show on the page?

Tx

Answer 1

Ok. I figured it out. Actually quite simple.

This is what I did:

Disabled the default Department property. Created a new Department property and mapped to department AD Field. Also set this Sharepoint property to use a term set.

I then added this markup to the People page to replace the default "Department" ProfilePropertyValue:

The next part is very important: I didn't see any values on my page because the privacy settings was hiding it. So either you have to inform your users that they have to change their privacy for this property to Everyone or you can force the Privacy to Everyone.

Next up, make sure the property is Alias and Indexed.

That's it. You now have a profile property for Department which users a Term set and syncronises back to Active Directory.