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Users Can Decide What Pronoun to Display in Profile Card
Updated March 30, 2023
Announced in message center notification MC515531 (last updated 21 February 2023), the ability to enable pronouns in Microsoft 365 profile cards is available in the Microsoft 365 admin center. Once enabled, users can set their preferred Microsoft 365 pronouns using the preview version of Teams. The pronoun feature is covered by Microsoft 365 roadmap item 86352 (Teams) and 115511 (OWA).
I have been able to update pronouns in Teams, OWA, and the latest build of the Monarch (“One Outlook”) client.
Employee Engagement
Microsoft’s documentation for the pronoun feature says that “the simple act of using the right pronouns for one another can help build trust and improve communication among colleagues.” Microsoft goes on to highlight that “Whether or not to share or publicly display pronouns is always up to an individual. Pronouns should never be assigned to one person by another person. It should be up to the person using them to decide when, where, and which pronouns are used – including whether to use this feature.”
In other words, organizations should do some thinking and employee engagement before they implement pronouns for profile cards.
Implementing Pronouns on the Microsoft 365 Profile Card
The first step is to enable pronouns for the organization. Go to Org settings in the Microsoft 365 admin center and select the Security & privacy tab. Pronouns is one of the listed options (Figure 1).
Microsoft says that it can take up to 7 hours before users can change their pronouns. In practice, expect the change to take a day before it is effective. If you disable pronouns, it will take the same length of time before pronouns disappear from view for all users. Microsoft 365 removes pronoun data if an organization disables the feature. Like most deletions in Microsoft 365, deletion is not immediate and if you reenable pronouns, previously set values will reappear.
After the software change is effective, users will see the option to update pronouns on their profile card. For instance, I clicked on my photo for a message posted to a Teams channel to reveal my profile card and see the option to add pronouns (Figure 2).
Remember Microsoft’s point that pronouns are a personal decision for users? To enable freedom of choice, you can add whatever text you like for a pronoun. The profile card suggests the commonly-used values such as “She/Her,” but you can ignore these values and use whatever text you prefer (up to 30 characters).
The important thing to remember is that pronouns are visible to all members of the organization. There’s no way to restrict pronoun display to a certain segment, such as members of a group. Guest members and external members of shared channels can’t see pronoun information on profile cards.
Building the Profile Card
Microsoft 365 stores user pronouns in a hidden folder in user Exchange Online mailboxes. Apps that support the profile card retrieve the information from the mailbox along with other properties (including custom attributes) to display the profile card (Figure 4).
A Change to Plan
Microsoft’s FAQ for pronouns contains some other useful information to consult before implementation. Displaying pronouns in the profile card is obviously something that an organization should think through before implementation. For example, some organizations also add pronouns to account display names, meaning that the information shows up in address books and other places where people see display names, like email headers, listings of documents in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business, and so on. Don’t rush to deploy just because someone (maybe a vocal proponent) thinks that pronouns are a good idea. Pause, consider, and then decide.
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Pretty sad to spend time writing an article on how to add pronouns and then add the transphobic “disconnected from reality”. Pathetic.
“Disconnected from reality” are not words that appear in the text. The words “unconnected from reality” do in a screenshot showing that the pronoun feature accommodates any chosen text. This term is an old one that I’ve used over the years (another is “thoughts of an idle mind”, going back to the days of VAX Notes in the 1980s). I’ve never read anything into it apart from occasionally my ramblings are a little unconnected.
Anyone found a way to get pronouns out via Graph? I dug around for hidden email folders but couldn’t find anything.
I imagine that might be a sensitive question and the data possibly used for unethical reasons, but then again an organization can use Graph to get every single bit of data you put into Microsoft 365. My goal is just to share them into profiles in our other systems.
I don’t see any Graph APIs to set pronouns for now. Did you do any network sniffing to see what endpoint Teams or OWA communicates with when the pronoun option is active?
The pronouns are stored in a hidden mailbox folder. Retrieving them is fairly easy using EWS, updating them seems to work ok (modulo caching), but creating them doesn’t work. I’d recommend waiting until (if) MSFT publishes a Graph API for it.
Hi, do you have any info of the folder name? Thanks!
The folder name is \ApplicationDataRoot\8c22b648-ee54-4ece-a4ca-3015b6d24f8e\source_sourcepersonaldata and the itemclass is SDS.8c22b648-ee54-4ece-a4ca-3015b6d24f8e.microsoft.fast.pi.source
There is a matching object in view_personaldata as well.
I strongly recommend you don’t try to modify these values. It can cause your clients to crash (OWA and Teams, so far).
Glen Scales has also looked into this and he published a gist on reading the values. I don’t have his link handy, but given the info above it should be easy to find with your favorite search engine.
Hi @swngdnz,
Can you let me know how to locate this folder via EWS?
Hi Michael, Thanks for the info. My idea is to build a pwsh to report the pronouns for all mailboxes that have that folder meanwhile there is no graph endpoint for it.
Now the issue I’m facing is that I can retrieve the item via EWS but not able to “read” the pronoun in the item (ItemClass: SDS.8c22b648-ee54-4ece-a4ca-3015b6d24f8e.microsoft.fast.pi.source)
The classes/methods I tried are:
[Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.EmailMessage]::Bind
[Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.ItemSchema]::MimeContent
Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.ExchangeService > FindItems
Any advice how to get there?
Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.ExtendedPropertyDefinition for SerializedSource. It’s a named property. As I suggested before, you can see complete sample code on Glen Scale’s gist. My code was written for a client and I can’t publish it.
Thank you for this, Michael.
Xavier, if you still need some help, this is the part that worked for me. I’m using the GUID and a property name.
$propertyName = “SerializedSource”
$propertyGuid = New-Object System.Guid(“8C22B648-EE54-4ECE-A4CA-3015B6D24F8E”)
$namedProperty = New-Object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.ExtendedPropertyDefinition($propertyGuid, $propertyName, [Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.MapiPropertyType]::String)
$propertySet = new-object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.PropertySet([Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.BasePropertySet]::FirstClassProperties)
$propertySet.Add($namedProperty)
$targetItem = $items[0]
$item = [Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.EmailMessage]::Bind($service, $targetItem.Id.UniqueId)
$item.Load($propertySet)
$namedPropertyValue = $item.ExtendedProperties.Value | ConvertFrom-Json
Did this for reporting pronouns?
Thanks for the answers. I didnt replyied here but already found how to do it with a similar approach.
The problem here is that checking this param for more than 80k mailboxes is quite long and also the App Regitration requires full permissions to all mailboxes so internally is a no-go due security risk.
I hope MS will publish a graph api endpoint to get this data soon.
I have enabled pronouns via admin center and MSGraph – it shows it is enabled but it still doesn’t show up in Teams. Any ideas?
Teams clients take time to pick up the new policy.
Does this work in the Government version of MS365? I have turned it on, but do not see it
Updates tend to be delayed for a few months before they reach GCC. I don’t know if pronoun support is available yet in GCC.
I have enabled it and disabled/renabled mulitple times. still not available.
Support mentioned that its not available for all organization at the moment. Is it true?
Yes, it could be that the software has not been rolled out to your tenant.
Is anyone aware of Pronoun available via graph? is this on MS road map?