Order of User Profile update

Question

I'm in the middle of configuring UPS and would appreciate some advise on the order of how the end user interacts with their profile and how updating of user profile and AD should work.

1. Users start life from AD, only a handful of fields get added.
2. UPS updates SharePoint profile datatabase.

3. every user needs an image, users are allowed to edit certain aspects of their profile (manager). Should this be user profile in SharePoint?

4. SharePoint exports to AD new information ? (i.e.image)

5. Ideally, I would want outlook to pick up the images from somewhere.

Is the above order correct, Im not keen on updating AD as in step 4. Is this needed?

Thanks

Answer 1

Generally, any properties pulled from AD are managed in AD, Name, etc. User attributes that are not as critical, or optional, like photo, cell phone, etc are maintained in SharePoint, kept up to date in SharePoint and (if you like) synchronized to AD, this is the case for User Photo. It you sync it to the thumbnail photo attribute, exchange and outlook will use it. Exchange will not use SharePoint directly (not yet), so you have to go through AD.