What are some good tools for setting up an Active Directory based company directory?

Question

We need to have a company directory setup so that people within our company can easily look up other user's extensions, location, a picture of the individual, and any other information.

What would be some good tools to do this so that we are able to manage everything through active directory but still provide our users with an itnerface to easily view all the information?

Edit:

We have SharePoint 2007 implemented in our organization but it does not provide an easy to use company directory that includes people's pictures. A custom SharePoint list would also not accomplish this as the information is to dense and not easily displayed enough. I don't want to do custom web part development for this as I want to just purchase the best of breed tool instead of re-inventing the wheel

Answer 1

Have you looked into SharePoint? I've seen such things implemented with it before. Do you have any existing intranet at all, or do you need to start something from scratch?

Also, Exchange and Outlook/OWA comes with a Global Address List, which does most of that (except for picture.)

Answer 2

I would recommend using MS Exchange w/ Outlook and having a global address list, especially if you already have Exchange as your mail server.Sharepoint will be underutlized unless you want a document sharing system at the same time.

Answer 3

You could look into OCS. Although it looks like they have renamed it to Microsoft Lync. I haven't been following closely at all. This link might be helpful for you, but from what I can tell (and remember) it does have the ability to store photos for contacts and other information. It ties into AD and all the Office/Outlook programs as well.

Answer 4

SharePoint 3rd party add-on's are your best hope IMO:

Bamboo has one. There are likely others but this is the only one I've looked into before (but never demo'ed): http://store.bamboosolutions.com/pc-41-1-user-directory-web-part-release-13.aspx