1. Ask Creative Services to create the thumbnail as a 648x648 JPG with 24 bit colour depth and a white background, saved as the users alias (USUALLY firstname.lastname – you can see this in Outlook Address Book):
    1. I grabbed the photos from the O Drive, Prof Photos, Staff Cutouts
    2. I used ‘Microsoft Photo’ to crop to a square shape around the head / head and shoulders area
    3. I then opened the image in ’Microsoft Paint’ and resized to 648x648 then saved as a JPG
  2. Copy the image file to BWITADMIN server in the following directory: C:\Scripts\Office365\Mail\Thumbnails\New
  3. Start a Powershell and run the following command: & 'C:\Scripts\Office365\Mail\Thumbnails\Update User Photos.ps1’ (incl. the & and the ‘’)
  4. You should see the script checking each enabling Mailbox and it should ‘pause’ as it uploads the image to Exchange of any user(s) who have photos saved in the ‘New’ folder
  5. The script then downloads a copy of the ‘current’ image (i.e. it should download the new version of the image!) to the .\Current folder – you can check it has uploaded by checking this image…

 

On some occasions, you get a large swathe of numbers / letters across the screen for 5-10s as it’ fails on the upload process. This is a pain and is an issue with Exchange365. You need to grab the JPG back from the ‘.\New\Uploaded’ directory and place it back in the ‘New’ directory and re-run the script…