Major issues for SharePoint-Exchange photo sync

As Microsoft suggested, we could leverage the high-resolution photos available in Exchange 2013 through SharePoint-Exchange photo sync feature. However, after we evaluated the architecture and implementation, we identified several major issues that you should serious consider before moving to production.

Here is the architecture and process explain by Jens from Microsoft.

SharePoint Server 2013 maintains a library of User Photos, just like in SharePoint Server 2010. When SharePoint-Exchange photo sync is enabled, SharePoint's local photo store becomes a cache, and SharePoint Server 2013 treats Exchange 2013 as the master photo store. SharePoint-Exchange photo sync is not a regular sync job that runs on a recurring cycle. Instead, SharePoint Server 2013 requests photos from Exchange 2013 automatically when a user performs an operation that causes a request for their own photo (for example, browsing to their own user profile page). That means that the user needs to have requested his/her own photo, before other users will be able to see it.


When a user with a valid Exchange 2013 mailbox attempts to change their profile photo, SharePoint Server 2013 will launch the Outlook 2013 Web App photo upload dialog.


Here are the main issues from this architecture and implementation.

1. Users need to have a mysite in order to sync the pictures from exchange. This is not valid for some companies. In our case, we have over 31,000 employees and around 10,000 of them have mysite. Most of the VPs and CEO will not have mysite. In another word, there will be significant number of missing pictures by this approach.

2. During picture load, a user has to perform an operation that causes a request for their own photo (for example, browsing to their own user profile page). That means that the user needs to have requested his/her own photo, before other users will be able to see it.

3. During picture update, since SharePoint-Exchange photo sync is not a regular sync job that runs on a recurring cycle,  users' picture will not be updated until users request it by browsing the mysite as described in issue #2.


4. There is also issue some users could not get pictures even browsing the mysite. we are working with Microsoft but have not find the solution.

These are some additional you can implement to workaround these issues. However, the cost and maintainability might lead us to a different approach that we had  implemented on SharePoint 2007. The approach is to write a program in either Powershell or C# to pull high-resolution photos available in external system directly to SharePoint.

If you have any better solution, please share.