I really don't knowhow much more of you are still using the "old style" VSM Customer Portal (for me the way it looks and behaves are hundred times better than this new silverlight style but it's my personal opinion only).
I don't even know how many years are left until its "retirement".
Anyway I am sharing my experience how it is possible to make the portal a bit nicer and more personalized than it is by default. Of course if you are not against to customize your system a little.
User photos
It's not a long time ago since we have started to store employees pictures in the Active Directory. It is quite nice to see persons photos when receiving emails, when talking with colleagues using Lync or reviewing information on internal SharePoint portal.
Then I thought - why not VSM? It should be not very difficult to attach pictures to a VSM Person record as object (the standard feature by the way) and to display it in the Portal (maybe in the Full Client app as well).
Especially when the method to display a binary picture on a web page has been already tested well since the picture quick preview mod (see my earlier post) implementation.
You may attach the picture to a Person record manually of course, but it's really not a rocket science to import photos from AD user objects (property thumbnailPhoto) and import it to VSM as Person object automatically. And you can even sync these pictures with AD every night in example.
So please feel free to share your notes and improvement suggestions or to ask questions if you are interested in details how to do that. I am not sure whether this is suitable to go in much details publicly but I will always try to help by PM at least.
Or simply you may ask your professional services contact to implement this change in your system if you like it. I am sure they can easily manage that. =)
Gytis