SharePoint 2010 : Search for People (in SharePoint Server)

You can perform a people search from most SharePoint Server sites by choosing People from the Scopes drop-down if this drop-down appears next to the site’s search box. Or you can navigate to the Search Center and choose the People tab.

As with documents and list items, you can conduct a people search by using either keywords or advanced searching methods. The advanced search when searching for people behaves slightly differently than the advanced search for documents and list items. To view the advanced search options, click on the Search Options link in the People search tab in the Search Center. You then see more search options. You can still search by keyword using the same box, and you can also specify values for specific people properties (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. The advanced search options in the People search tab in the Search Center.

For example, to look for someone whose first name is John and whose job title is Human Resources Manager, type John in the First Name box and Human Resources Manager in the Job Title box. Then click the Search button (the one that looks like a magnifying glass). The search results page that appears shows you the people search results.

Unlike the results for documents and list items, these results are ordered by social distance. This is something special for the people search that shows you the people you work with first, and people they work with second, and then anyone else. SharePoint knows who you work with only if you tell it by using the Colleagues mechanism. This mechanism allows you to specify who you work with either from the search results (by using the Add to Colleagues link) or from your personal site . SharePoint automatically recognizes some colleagues, such as your manager, people you manage, and other people who have the same manager. Another thing that is unique to people search results is the Browse in Organizational Chart link that may appear for each result. Clicking this link redirects you to a page that shows an organizational chart and the selected user’s location in it.

If you want to change the sort order, open the Sort By drop-down (shown in Figure 2) and select either Default, Social Distance, or Name options.

Figure 2. The people search results page.

People search results have another distinguishing feature that the results of documents and list items search results do not have by default: The results are grouped showing people who are your colleagues who were returned as part of your search under one group, people who are colleagues to your colleagues as another group, and so on. If your search results include yourself (for example, if you search for people with the same first name as you), the search result for your profile will show up in a group by itself—a group called Me.

In Figure 2 you can see that John Doe is labeled My Colleague under the picture. That is because John was marked as someone who is important to the user who searched for him.

To help you find people more accurately, you also have an option to filter the search results further by choosing from different groups of results. For example, if you searched for John Doe, you might want to see only users with those words in the name of the user, and not people who have those words in their description or some other place. To do this, click on the Name Matches link on the left to filter the list of results to show only people whose user name has the terms you searched for. Also, if SharePoint detects that there are other user properties that can help you filter, it automatically adds them as filters to the pane. As shown in Figure 3, the Job Title property filter is shown on the site, allowing you to view the results for all job titles (default) or filter on Manager of IT Services or on Secretary.

In the search results shown in Figure 2, you can see a blank square to the left of each person’s name. If you hover over the square with your mouse, you see a dialog with options to contact the person, such as e-mail, chat, phone, and scheduling a meeting (see Figure 3). Click on the square to expand the dialog to show the person’s contact details (see Figure 4). You can then switch to the Organization tab to see where that person is in the organization’s hierarchy, as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 3. The person dialog appears when you hover over the square next to the person’s name.