Staff Directory: More Than Just a Web Part

Most intranets come with a staff directory web part. It usually looks like a simple list of names, phone numbers, and email addresses.

Useful?

Sometimes...

But in a modern workplace, spread across offices, time zones, and remote setups, it’s no longer enough.

A modern employee directory should do more than just tell you someone’s extension. It should help you understand who people are, where they fit in, and how your company connects.

That’s why the old web parts and digital address books don’t cut it anymore.

The Job Your Staff Directory is “Hired” To Do

A staff directory exists to help people:

• Find the right person fast (name, skills, location, team).
• Understand how the organization fits together (managers, teams, dotted lines).
• Ramp up new hires with context and connections on day one.
• Unlock hidden expertise to speed up projects and decisions.
• Keep your people data accurate without creating a second system to maintain.

Done right, the impact is real. Research from McKinsey shows that creating searchable, connected people knowledge can reduce time spent searching by up to 35%, an enormous lever for productivity at scale.

What a Staff Directory Web Part Actually Gives You

Web parts are great page components. But they’re not designed to be your company’s system of record for people.

• SharePoint People web part
  Perfect for showcasing a handful of colleagues on a page, small, medium, or large cards, added manually by name. Useful for team pages; not a global directory.
• SharePoint Organization Chart web part
  Handy to visualize hierarchy around a specific person you select, with simple “levels up” and “reports” views. Great for a snapshot; not built for deep navigation, discovery, or export.
• Microsoft Org Explorer (Outlook/Teams)
  A built‑in org viewer that lets you browse reporting lines and see profile details. It’s increasingly available across Microsoft 365, but it’s intentionally lightweight and focused on quick checks, not a full directory platform.

Bottom line: web parts and Org Explorer are helpful for glimpses of people and structure, not for running a company‑wide people directory.

Where the Staff Directory Web‑Part Approach Falls Short

1. Scale & search. A real directory lets anyone find anyone by name, department, office, skills, or custom attributes, and returns actual people (not a haystack of documents). Web parts don’t do this.
2. Org complexity. Modern orgs aren’t just manager→report. You need assistants, dotted‑line reporting, matrix teams, and exports for planning decks. Web parts don’t cover these cases.
3. Data stewardship. You need automatic sync with Microsoft 365 (Entra ID/Azure AD), role‑based editing, and visibility into profile completeness, without building bespoke flows.
4. Experiences across the workplace. People data must travel (Teams, Outlook, the intranet, onboarding, org reviews), not live in one page slot. Microsoft’s profile cards give a compact view in apps, but they aren’t a full directory experience.
5. Post‑Delve reality. With the retirement of Microsoft Delve in December 2024, many orgs lost a familiar profile surface and are now rethinking where rich profiles truly live.

What an Employee Directory Platform Looks Like

A proper staff directory platform brings together people, structure, places, and skills, and it’s always current because it’s powered by Microsoft 365.

1) Visual people search (that thinks in people, not files)

Search “Lee” and get Lee, the person, with instant filters for department, location, role, skills, and more. Results can be flipped between Face, Card, List, or Org views without losing context. 

2) Rich, editable profiles

Profiles are beautiful and functional: click‑to‑call, Teams chat, reporting line preview, skills and interests, and admin‑controlled editing so data stays clean.

3) Live org charts

Zoom across the org, highlight a reporting path, see assistants and dotted‑line relationships, and export charts for board decks and planning reviews, all fed by your Microsoft 365 reporting hierarchy.

4) Places: offices and departments

Give each office or department a living “home” with people, key details, and context, crucial for distributed and hybrid teams.

5) Skills that unlock expertise

Skills belong inside the directory, so employees can find experts, and leaders can see capabilities.

With over 37,000 built-in and customizable skills, the OneDirectory® Skills Dataset transforms your staff directory into a living skills directory. Employees can easily find coworkers with the right expertise, while leaders uncover hidden talent and see capabilities across the business.

6) Governance & data quality

The directory should reveal gaps (missing managers, titles, photos, locations), support role‑based editing, and sync automatically with Microsoft 365, so you fix data once and trust it everywhere.

Build vs. Buy (and why the answer changes after 300+ employees)

Could you build a “staff directory” with SharePoint, JSON formatting, and a few web parts?

Sure. But as the company scales, four problems emerge:

• Maintenance overhead balloons (manual fixes, list throttling workarounds, brittle Power Automate flows).
• Feature gaps (skills, assistants, dotted lines, export, governance) become pilots you never finish.
• Adoption stalls when employees can’t rely on a fast, relevant people search.
• The Delve gap leaves you without a natural home for rich, explorable profiles across the org. 

A purpose‑built employee directory platform sidesteps all four with guided setup, Entra ID/Azure AD sync, and scalability into the tens of thousands of users, and does it in hours, not quarters. 

Staff Directory Web Part vs. Employee Directory Platform: A Quick Decision Checklist

If you answer yes to any of these, you’re beyond “web part” territory:

• We need to search by skills, department, location, or custom attributes.
• We have assistants, dotted‑line reporting, or matrix teams to visualize.
• We need exportable, branded org charts for leadership updates.
• Our profiles should be editable with permissions and kept in sync with Microsoft 365. 
• We want office/department pages that stay current automatically.
• We want to complement profile cards and Org Explorer with a deeper, company‑wide directory experience.

If you answered no to all of the above and simply need a small team contact list on a page, the People web part is perfect. If not, you’re looking for an employee directory platform.

The Takeaway

A staff directory is not a web part.

It’s a living, searchable, continuously updated map of your organization, people, teams, places, and skills, built to reduce the time it takes to find the right colleague and increase how connected your company feels.

If you’re on Microsoft 365 and you’ve outgrown web parts, consider a platform approach purpose‑built for this job: fast people search, rich profiles, live org charts (including assistants and dotted lines), skills, places, data quality controls, and seamless Microsoft 365 integration.