Using information from User Profiles Outside of SharePoint - web-services

Question

I'm creating website that creates a page for each person in our department with their contact information. The page can then be linked to from a qr code on a business card.
What is the best way to get the information out of their SharePoint profiles?
edit: I'm not very familiar with creating stuff in Visual Studio. I'm using Ruby on Rails for the website and I've read SharePoint has REST services which would work great but I can't seem to figure out how to access the User Profile information.

Answer 1

You don't need to use Visual Studio. You just need to be able to use a SOAP based web service from Ruby. The documentation for the User Profile web service is here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa980957(office.12).aspx

Answer 2

You can use the SharePoint UserProfile WebService to achieve this.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms494053.aspx
Or, if you need something more specific, you could create your own WebService which access's the UserProfile API like this -
using (var site = new SPSite("http://yourserver"))
{
var userProfileManager =
new UserProfileManager(SPServiceContext.GetContext(site));
var userProfile =
userProfileManager.GetUserProfile("domain\accountName");
//iterate the userprofile properties
foreach (UserProfileValueCollection prop in userProfile)
Console.WriteLine(prop.Value);
}