Working with documents, lists, and web
pages is only one of the many reasons SharePoint 2010 is attractive as
a portal and collaboration platform. Another part of the equation is
SharePoint's ability to connect people with other people through its
form of social networking. People have different skills, competencies,
resources, and networks that are most likely not implicitly known to
everyone in an organization. The aggregation of knowledge about people
is what has made social networking Internet sites such as Facebook,
MySpace, and LinkedIn such core experiences inside and outside of the
office. The value of participating in these sites is not to find
information stored within documents, but to find information stored
within and about people.
Within a company, people are arguably the most
valuable resource. Knowing who can provide the right expertise, who
knows whom, and who works for whom can provide answers that a company
directory cannot. Knowledge about people's competencies within an
organization can produce greater efficiencies by directing answer
seekers to knowledgeable experts, instead of reproducing research and
answers. SharePoint 2010 can provide the platform for connecting people
with this information. If a user needs a list of employees that know
how to manufacture a widget, or create a specialized spreadsheet, or
review a legal agreement, SharePoint 2010 can provide those answers
through the People search page.
Note
This section is not about how to direct SharePoint to crawl data about
people, but instead it is about how to retrieve that data once it is
crawled.
If set up, the People search page can provide
access to data such as that found in MySites, user profiles, Active
Directory, web sites, collaboration sites, as well as personal and
professional blogs.
The People search page can be accessed through
the same pathways as an All Sites search page. To review, these
pathways include navigating to the search center and selecting the
People tab, or entering a search in the query box and selecting the
People search scope. Figure 1 shows the selection of the People scope if this option is enabled on the query box.
Figure 1. People scope on the query box
People Search Options
Similar to the All Sites search page,
navigating the the People search tab provides a few options not
available by default from the query box. These include a link to the
Preferences page and a link to open the search options. The Preferences
page is by default identical to the Preferences page for All Sites
search. Selecting Search Options opens up the People search equivalent
of advanced search options. Unlike the Advanced Search page found on
the All Sites search, however, selecting Search Options simply opens a
set of free text fields to enter additional parameters to the query.
The default fields for Search Options are shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2. People search options
The search fields that direct toward a People
search results page work just like any other search field. A query is
entered, in this case for a person, skill, job title, keyword, etc.,
the query is run, and the results are returned on the People search
results page. As seen in Figure 3, the layout of this search results page is fairly similar to the All Sites search, with a few exceptions.
Figure 3. People search results page
The search field and the Preferences page still
appear at the same location. The Search Options link replaces the
Advanced Search page link, but simply opens up an additional set of
options below the query field. These options are the same as a free
text property restriction. The Last Name and First Name fields allow a
user to search for a person's first or last name respectively. Search
queries are not case-sensitive, so there is no need to capitalize the
first letter of a first or last name in the query. The Last Name and
First Name fields will search for exact matches to the entered query,
so if a user enters the query “Sand” into the Last Name field, it will
not return results for a user with the last name “Sanderson”. To
indicate that a query entered into the Last Name or First Name fields
is intended to be part of a name, and not an exact match, the user must
enter the wildcard character, “*”. It is important to note that just
like searching in All Sites, partial word searches are restricted to
prefix matching in People search.
The Job Title and Keyword search fields will
also match only an exact term unless the wildcard operator is inserted.
Unlike first and last names, however, these fields in a result may
include more than one term. Consequently, the entered keyword or job
title must match exactly one term in the result, but the result doesn't
need to match only the entered query. As a result, entering part of a
job title, such as a query for “sales”, would return people with the
job title “Sales”, “Regional Sales Manager”, or “Sales Director”, since
each contains an exact match for the term “sales”.
As mentioned earlier, the Search Options
section functions just like the Advanced Search page and more
specifically, property restrictions. Just like property restrictions
for documents, not all users will be concerned with learning to use
property restriction in People search, especially considering that
search options occur as a drop-down instead of a completely different
page. It may be useful, however, for some users and administrators to
know the property names for the fields in this section. The reason for
this is that the fields in the search options do not allow for multiple
property restrictions on the same property as in the Advanced Search
page. If a user enters the terms “Josh Robert”, “Josh OR Robert”,
“Josh; Robert”, or any other combination that may seem logical in a
different search engine to denote two separate terms, the desired
results will not be returned. This means that if a user wishes to
return results for users with either the first name “Josh” or “Robert”,
the user is unable to do so without manually entering the property
restriction syntax shown here.
FirstName:"Josh" OR FirstName:"Robert"
When multiple, different
fields or property restrictions on the Search Options are completed,
each field will be separated with the AND operator. This means that the
query will return only results that match the terms entered in all
fields, but will not return results that meet a portion of the query.
To assist in the building of broader People search queries, the default
property names can be found in Table 1.
Table 1. People Search Property Names
| Property Name |
| LastName |
| FirstName |
| JobTitle |
| Responsibility |
| Skills |
| Interests |
Standard Web Parts in People Search Results
The People search results page does
allow for the Alert Me, RSS, and Search from Windows actions provided
in the All Sites search. These features operate the same in People
search as they do in All Sites search. This search page also allows for
faceted search refinements that function just like All Sites search,
but the page also allows for filtering on properties relevant to the
people scope. The default refiners in People search include View and
Job Title, but these options can be expanded by the administrator
depending on the managed properties with an environment. View allows
for users to specify if the result was returned due to a query match in
the person's profile or name. Depending on the type and amount of
information provided within a person's profile, this provides a useful
tool to specify whether a user is looking for a specific person, or
someone that works with or knows a person. Refining by Job Title is
useful for larger result sets in which the user generally knows the
title of the person he or she is looking for, but may not be able to be
specific enough to enter a search for Job Title in the Search Options.
