As we've learned from the previous recipe, you can create a SharePoint user profile which can be consumed by custom components and applications as well as out-of-the-box web parts.
When your developers see the power of using user profiles to store user-specific information for their applications, there is no doubt you will receive requests to extend user profile properties to facilitate additional user profile information.
Adding user profile properties manually can result in a disconnect between your staging and production environments and additional manual steps during disaster recovery. As an alternative, you may want to choose to provision profile properties using a custom SharePoint solution, which will require a deployment down time.
Let's take a look at what's involved in provisioning custom user profile properties with PowerShell which introduces little to no downtime.