Managing Departments

Admin  This guide covers the in-app Manage Departments panel — accessible from the sidebar in the directory web part. SharePoint or site-owner permission is required to open it.

TeamBook Connected Org gives departments a first-class presence: each department is a row in the TeambookDepartments SharePoint list inside your site collection. The list is auto-provisioned the first time the directory loads, so you have nothing to set up manually.

Once the list exists, manage it from the Manage Departments sidebar item — not by editing the SharePoint list directly. The in-app panel gives you live previews, validation, and a one-click Microsoft Entra ID import.

Opening Manage Departments

  1. Open any page hosting the directory web part.
  2. In the sidebar, click Manage Departments (visible only to SharePoint site owners / admins).
  3. The panel opens with the current list of departments.

One-click import from Microsoft Entra ID

The fastest way to populate departments is to import them from your existing Microsoft Entra ID data.

  1. In the Manage Departments panel, click Import from Microsoft 365.
  2. The panel scans every employee’s department field in Microsoft Entra ID and lists every distinct value.
  3. Tick the values you want to bring in as departments.
  4. Click Import.
  5. Each ticked value becomes a new row in TeambookDepartments — with a generated icon and accent colour you can tweak afterwards.

Importing is idempotent — running it again only brings in new values you haven’t already imported. Existing rows are not touched.

Editing a department

Click any department row to open the editor. Fields:

FieldDescription
TitleThe display name shown on the Departments grid and detail page.
Microsoft Entra ID department valueThe exact value in Entra ID that should match users to this department. Case-insensitive.
DescriptionA short paragraph shown on the detail page hero.
IconA Material Symbol (search the picker by name).
Accent colourA hex colour for the department’s pill, accent bar, and detail-page hero gradient.
Department head emailOptional. The colleague whose avatar appears as “Head of department” on the detail page.
Display orderNumber — lower values sort first on the grid.
HiddenTick to keep the department row but hide it from the user-facing grid.

Click Save. Changes appear in the directory on the next page load.

Adding a department manually

  1. Click + Add department.
  2. Fill in at minimum the Title and the Microsoft Entra ID department value.
  3. Optionally set the icon, accent colour, description, head email.
  4. Click Save.

Removing a department

Click the row’s overflow menu (⋯) → Delete. The row is removed from TeambookDepartments. People whose Entra ID department field matched it still appear in the main directory and search — they just aren’t grouped under a tile any more.

Prefer Hidden over Delete for temporary changes. Hidden departments stay in the list (preserving their accent colour, icon, head-of-department) but disappear from the user-facing grid. Toggle back on later in one click.

When data doesn’t match

If a colleague’s Microsoft Entra ID department field doesn’t exactly match any Microsoft Entra ID department value in the list, the colleague still appears in the main Employee Directory and in search — they’re just ungrouped on the Departments page.

To fix this either:

  • Update the colleague’s department value in Microsoft Entra ID, or
  • Add the existing value as a new department row in TeamBook (or rename an existing row’s Microsoft Entra ID department value to match).

Direct SharePoint-list access (advanced)

The underlying SharePoint list lives at https://<tenant>.sharepoint.com/sites/<your-site>/Lists/TeambookDepartments and you can edit it directly. We recommend using the in-app panel because:

  • It validates your Microsoft Entra ID department value against actual Entra data.
  • It gives you a live colour preview.
  • It populates the icon picker with the same Material Symbols the directory uses.
  • It batches related fields so you don’t accidentally save a half-finished row.

If you ever need to inspect or bulk-edit the list directly, the columns are: Title, EntraDepartmentValue, Description, Icon, AccentColor, DeptHeadEmail, DisplayOrder, Hidden.