Synchronising Active Directory User Attributes into SharePoint Online User Profile Properties

Picture an organisation that uses Active Directory for Identity Management, and their AD database contains a range of user properties. That shouldn't require too much imagination...

Now imagine that, after previously having no real trouble synchronising these properties into SharePoint on-premises User Profiles in the past, they now want to synchronise the properties into Office 365 SharePoint Online User Profiles. It would be natural to assume that once ADFS and DirSync were correctly configured, it would be pretty basic to set up property mappings as needed. Unfortunately, things aren't quite so simple...

The short story is that only the following properties get synchronised (here I'm ignoring internal reference properties that end users won't care about):

AD Attribute	User Profile Property
givenName	First Name
sn	Last Name
displayName	Name
telephoneNumber	Work Phone
department	Department
title	Title
title	Job Title
manager	Manager
wWWHomePage	Public Site Redirect
proxyAddresses	SIP Address
mail	Work e-mail
physicalDeliveryOfficeName	Office

This is a good start but many organisations will want more (Mobile Number is the first one that comes to mind). Unfortunately, it just isn't possible in the current version of SharePoint Online. You can't add any more properties to be synchronised or even change the mappings for the properties that are already being synchronised. If you try to modify a User Profile Property through the Office 365 Admin UI, the relevant options are presented but not usable:

Here's a property which is already being synchronised through ADFS that I'd like to modify but there are no Source Data Connections or Attributes to select.

Here's the not so helpful dropdown when I click on Source Data Connection. It looks like this UI has been left in SharePoint Online but has no function at this point in time.

What is really frustrating is all that text on the left relating to BCS which would be a viable option in SharePoint on-premises (and was suggested to me by multiple people). Unfortunately, this process requires configuring the BCS service application which is not possible in SharePoint Online. This Community forum post reiterates that the approach is not available for Office 365.

I've discussed this with a few people within Microsoft and the limitation has been acknowledged although it's not directly documented anywhere.

One key fact to remember in understanding the cause of this limitation is that the synchronisation is a two step process. First, the properties are synchronised from your on-premises domain up into the Office 365 domain using ADFS and DirSync (I'm no expert on this process and I've probably oversimplified it). This process allows the data to become available to the Exchange and Lync components of Office 365. The properties that are synchronised in this process are listed by Microsoft here, as far as I am aware this cannot be customised (but I'd welcome it if anyone can correct me here).

Secondly, the properties are synchronised from the cloud domain into SharePoint Online User Profiles using a synchronisation process which is completely internal and hidden from Office 365 tenancy administrators. The documentation here shows the default property mappings for this process for SharePoint 2010 which as far as I can tell applies to both on-premises and Office 365 instances of SharePoint. The key difference is that on-premises SharePoint provides a friendly interface for customising these mappings whereas SharePoint Online offers no UI or administrative capacity at all.

By combining the above documentation it's fairly simple to work out which properties make it all the way from start to finish. If you want more properties then you'll have to put together a completely custom process, but that's a topic for another post...

Note that all of this discussion is based on the 2010 (Wave 14) version of SharePoint Online, I haven't seen ADFS hooked up to a Wave 15 version yet so I'm not sure whether the situation will improve in the upcoming release of Office 365. I'd love to hear if anyone can shed some light on this!