Attribute coverage

Attribute coverage audits your directory. For each attribute a signature can use, it shows how much of your organisation actually has a value.

Run it before you design, not after. A signature built around department looks fine in preview and falls apart in production if a third of the directory has none.

What it covers

Every attribute that maps to a placeholder: the identity fields, the phone numbers, job title and department, company name, employee ID and employee type, the address components, the manager fields, and all fifteen extension attributes.

Four kinds of placeholder are left out, because none has a populated or missing state in the directory to score. The derived helpers anyPhone, anyAddress, hasPhoto, onBehalfOf, isGroup and notGroup are computed rather than stored. contactCardUrl is supplied by Sigil rather than read from the directory. The sender fields describe whoever is composing rather than the mailbox being audited, so a gap in one is a gap in somebody else’s record. And profile fields, the {{custom.…}} placeholders your colleagues fill in themselves, were never in Entra at all. Auditing any of them would report a permanent gap in something that was never this mailbox’s attribute to hold.

How many people have filled in each profile field is reported on the Profile fields page instead, where the number means what it says.

The manager fields cover all four placeholders, not just the manager’s name. A manager’s job title, email address and phone number are each scored separately, so a template that prints a manager’s contact details can be checked properly before it is published.

Manager details are a navigation property in Microsoft Graph rather than a plain attribute, so the audit asks for them explicitly. That makes it slower on a large directory than the seat count or the adoption report, neither of which reads manager at all.

The extension attributes are the ones most worth checking. They have no enforced meaning, so whether they are populated at all is entirely up to how your organisation uses them.

How to use it

Three situations call for it.

Before designing a template, to find out which attributes you can rely on.

Before writing an assignment rule that matches on an attribute, because a rule matching on officeLocation only reaches the people who have one.

When a signature is missing a field for some people, to find out whether it is one person or a systemic gap.

Running the audit

The audit walks every mailbox in the directory, so it runs when you ask rather than when the page opens. You need the Admin, Editor, Viewer or Compliance role, a custom role given Monitoring, or a partner role inside a managed client.

1. Open Attribute coverage in the portal sidebar, under Directory.
2. Choose Run audit. The button reads Running while the directory is walked.
3. Read the table. Each row is one attribute, with Populated as a count out of the total and Missing for as the number of mailboxes without a value. A row with nothing missing shows the full count and a dash under Missing for.

A message confirms how many mailboxes were audited and, where any were left out, how many external accounts were excluded.

Finding which attribute is missing for one person

The view lists the gap per attribute rather than per person, so the answer comes from the export.

1. Run the audit as above.
2. In the row for the attribute you are checking, choose Export (CSV). The button only appears on rows with a gap.
3. Open the download and look for the person’s address. The file lists every mailbox missing that attribute, one per row.
4. Repeat for each attribute the template uses.

The file is named after the attribute, such as missing-department.csv.

What to do about a gap

Two options, and they are not exclusive.

Populate the directory. This is the better fix where the data should exist anyway. It improves the address book at the same time, and it is often less work than it looks, since much of it is bulk-editable.

Design around it. Wrap the affected part of the template in a conditional section so it disappears cleanly for people without the value, rather than leaving a stray separator or an empty label.

The derived helpers anyPhone and anyAddress are built for this. Attaching a whole contact row to {{#anyPhone}} lets the entire row disappear rather than each field inside it.

Extension attributes and on-premises sync

Extension attributes are writable for cloud-only users but read-only for users synced from on-premises Active Directory. If your users are synced, populating them means changing AD and letting the change flow through, rather than editing in Entra.

Who is counted

Every account in your directory, shared and resource mailboxes included. The audit does not check for a mailbox or a licence, so an unlicensed account or a disabled leaver still in the directory is counted too.

Two groups are left out.

Accounts invited in from outside. They have no mailbox here, never compose through the add-in, and their attributes are set by their own organisation, so counting them would inflate every missing figure on the report. That covers guests and B2B invitees who were later converted to member accounts, because how an account was created is what Sigil tests rather than what type it is now.

Mailboxes you have excluded from Sigil. They will never be sent a signature, so an empty job title on a warehouse account is not a data quality problem to fix. Counting them would make the coverage score worse the more diligently you used cost management. In inclusion mode the same rule works the other way round: only the mailboxes on your list are counted, and everyone else is left out.

Both are left out deliberately. When an audit finishes, the portal’s message says how many mailboxes it audited and, where there were any, how many external accounts it left out. The number left out by cost management is not shown there. If the number of mailboxes looks lower than you expected, check the external count in that message, then compare against your cost management list.

Why the count differs from your seat count

Attribute coverage counts shared mailboxes, because a shared mailbox still needs a signature.

Billing does not, because shared and resource mailboxes are unlicensed and therefore free.

The two numbers answer different questions and are expected to differ.

Having the gaps come to you

The health digest reports the same gaps by email, narrowed to the attributes your default new-message and reply templates reference and to those missing on at least 10% of mailboxes. The one exception is the manager fields, which the digest currently reports as missing for everybody. The figures on this page are the right ones for those.

That is the shorter question, answered without anybody opening the portal. This page is where you go once it has told you there is something to look at, because it covers every attribute rather than only the ones in use.

Who can run it

Admins, Editors, Viewers and the Compliance role, which all hold monitoring, and any custom role given it. Partner Owner, Admin and Technician staff can run it inside a managed client. The Marketing and Billing roles do not reach it. See users and roles.