With Office365 you can have profile pictures, and this setting is enabled by default. In larger organizations you may not want this policy enabled or have a customized policy for different departments. Here’s what I had to do to disable the picture upload capability by default and use powershell to update it for individuals by using a customized policy.
Let’s get started.
Connect to Office365 from Powershell:
Check if you have any existing policies that allow photos to be enabled and displayed:
Result:
Let’s create a new policy:
Check the setting for the newly created policy:
Result:
We need to make sure that users using this new policy are the only one that can upload their picture via the Office365 Portal.
Set the default policy to restrict the capability to upload pictures:
Check for how many policies you have now:
Result:
Assign the new policy to admins:
Normally you would never need this but still depending on your requirements if you wanted to apply the new policy (just change the policy name from the one list to the new one you created) or revert everything back to the default policy:
Check the policy against users to see what they are using:
You are done.
Now each user with the new policy will be able to upload their profile pics and users with the default policy will not be able to upload their pictures.
Picture dimensions:
I have used 96×96 based on the MSDN forum in the past but noticed a lot of pixelation in the contact cards. I was able to get 280 x 280 resolution to get a nice resolution profile pic.