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Understand how organizational data is used and retained in Microsoft 365

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You can use organizational data together with data from your organization's Microsoft Entra ID instance as input for your users' Microsoft 365 User Profiles and to power certain capabilities in Microsoft 365 applications, including Microsoft Viva.

Review the following information to understand how organizational data is used, stored, and deleted.

Data usage

The organizational data you upload may be used by Viva, Microsoft 365 services, and non-Microsoft services that have been given access through the Microsoft Graph API. This data is treated as publicly available within the organization, meaning it may be displayed to any end user in the organization. This data might also be used in cross-tenant collaboration scenarios, in Microsoft 365 Copilot, and machine learning model training.

In the Microsoft 365 User Profile, Microsoft Entra data is given precedence over Organizational Data in Microsoft 365 by default. When a service queries a Microsoft 365 User Profile, if there's both organizational data and Microsoft Entra data for a single attribute, the Microsoft Entra value is returned. For example, a given end user has "Software Engineer" as the jobTitle property in Microsoft Entra ID. The global admin for your organization uses the Organizational Data in Microsoft 365 feature to upload a value of "Senior Software Engineer" for the Microsoft_JobTitle attribute for that same end user. After the upload, both values are stored in the end user's Microsoft 365 User Profile. When an experience like Profile cards in Microsoft 365 queries the Microsoft 365 User Profile to get the jobTitle property for that end user, "Software Engineer" is returned (instead of "Senior Software Engineer").

If, however, there's no data for an attribute in Entra ID, the corresponding organizational data value is used. So, in the previous example, if there's no value for jobTitle in Entra ID, the Profile card in Microsoft 365 uses "Senior Software Engineer" from Organizational Data in Microsoft 365.

If you prefer to use the value from your organizational data in the Microsoft 365 User Profile, contact Microsoft by sending a request to orgdatainm365support@microsoft.com. Include the subject line, "Request to give organizational data precedence over Microsoft Entra data in Microsoft 365 User Profile for Tenant [Name] [Tenant ID]." It can take up to four days for this change to take effect.

If you later want to switch back to the default behavior (where Microsoft Entra data is given precedence), contact Microsoft again, using a subject line of, "Request to give Microsoft Entra data precedence over Organizational Data in Microsoft 365 User Profile for Tenant [Name] [Tenant ID]." This change also takes up to four days.

To ensure that the data in the Microsoft 365 User Profile remains up to date and accurate, we recommend that you upload refreshed organizational data regularly (for example, weekly). This prevents the data in the user profile from becoming stale when compared to the data in your organization's human capital management systems.

Ensure that the data you upload matches attribute names and descriptions listed in the Attribute reference. Also avoid uploading sensitive personal data.

How organizational data works with Viva Insights

The data uploaded as part of Organizational Data in Microsoft 365 is also used in Viva Insights and is mapped to these Viva Insights reserved fields:

  • PersonId
  • ManagerId
  • Organization
  • LevelDesignation
  • FunctionType
  • Layer
  • Location

The following data is uploaded from the Organizational Data feature but isn't available for use in Viva Insights:

  • Microsoft_DisplayName
  • Microsoft_FirstName
  • Microsoft_LastName
  • Microsoft_SecondaryJobTitle
  • Microsoft_UserSkillNames

These attributes are available to use as custom attributes in Viva Insights.

  • Microsoft_JobTitle
  • Microsoft_City
  • Microsoft_CountryOrRegion
  • Microsoft_PostalCode
  • Microsoft_PostOfficeBox

Data deletion

See Update or make other changes to organizational data for information about deleting user data. As soon as the update is processed, the associated user data is overwritten with blank fields, meaning their data is effectively deleted immediately.

When a tenant is removed from Microsoft 365, all tenant data is purged within 30 days.

Data retention

Organizational data is stored as long as the end user is active and has a valid license and no deletion request has been made by the end user or the global admin.

Data residency

When you upload organizational data, your .csv file is stored in your SharePoint Online site, and each end user's organizational data attributes are scoped to their Microsoft 365 User Profile and stored in the user's Exchange Online mailbox. For data residency information for SharePoint Online and Exchange Online, see Data Residency for SharePoint Online and Data Residency for Exchange Online.

Manage data subject requests

A Data Subject Request or DSR is a formal request by a data subject (an end user) to a controller to take an action on their personal data. To understand what data subject rights end users have, see Office 365 Data Subject Requests Under the GDPR and CCPA.

Use the following information to fulfill DSRs from end users: