SharePoint, Employee Directories and Temporary Employees
What is Mary’s phone extension? For many, the answer involves looking to the right or left of their computer monitors to a piece of paper tacked to the wall that lists all employees and phone numbers. I know; not the most efficient method… but it works. At some point, someone has a ‘eureka’ moment and realizes that you can use SharePoint and the native ability to import Active Directory profile data to (pretty easily) build an employee directory. Hold on. Like all things, you need to think this one through.
Does your company use temporary or contract employees? If yes, you probably (I hope!) have thought about the impact on your security model for your SharePoint environment. Maybe you don’t want them to have access to the intranet; maybe they should only see certain sections. The main challenge here is that you must leverage Active Directory to somehow define employees (versus non-employees) because, remember, SharePoint uses an inclusive (not exclusive) security framework. Let’s assume you have that one covered. Today, I want to talk specifically about temporary workers and an employee directory.
You may remember the court battle involving Microsoft, temporary workers and whether those temporary workers were entitled to benefits. There is lots of activity in this space (full disclosure – I am not a lawyer; just an interested observer). Here’s the thing. More and more companies are taking extra steps (based on legislation) to clearly indicate that a representative of the organization is not an employee (example – altering an email autosignature to disclose temporary status). If you do some digging on recommendations on this subject you will find statements like “do not list temporary workers in any employee directory.”
Think SharePoint now. You do an import from Active Directory and build simple search queries to show all employees or department members. Based on how you have organized AD and the profile import, you may have included non-employees. OK, maybe that’s not a bad thing… but, do you clearly identify them as temporary or contract hires? Mmm…
Here’s another thing to think/worry about that Sue Hanley mentioned to me recently. In some organizations, from a privacy perspective, employee photos should NOT be seen by non-employees. That is, a temporary employee can use the employee directory but not see associated photos. Interesting.
Bottom line, all of this is solvable with SharePoint. You can change AD, configure the import, leverage security or take other steps. That’s the easy part. Knowing the do’s and don’ts around employee and non-employee data is the biggest challenge. So, before you walk around and rip up all of those paper directories and deploy that “way cool” SharePoint-based employee directory think about the data you have in place, the privacy and legal concerns you might have and (wait for it) plan…