Searching for People

As mentioned earlier in this chapter, MOSS 2007 enables people to find other people based on their expertise and role in the organization. With careful planning, your deployment will allow easy discovery of other people within teams and around your organization. In addition to creating these relationships through common properties, you can utilize SharePoint Search to find the people you are looking for. By default, the following methods of finding people are enabled:

• The People search scope: This is a search scope that limits search results to the public profiles in the user profile store for the SSP. Regardless of the search terms used, only people who match those terms appear in search results.

• The People tab: In the Search Center the People tab provides options for finding people. You can find people by name or related subject, or by people-related properties such as Title and Department.

• Advanced search: Allows you to find people by searching specific user profile property values. Every user profile that matches the value of the selected profile will appear in search results.

• From values for user profile properties: You can find people without explicitly searching by clicking values for users to find other users with the same value for the property. These properties can appear in user profiles, user information lists, SharePoint lists, or in general search results.

• Refined searches: You can refine search results for a people search to include only results for people with a specific value in their user profiles.

• People group by social distance: By default, all searches for people are grouped by social distance. People who work most closely with the person viewing search results are grouped first, followed by people more distant.

Regardless of the search method used, the people search results contain links to the public profiles of each user, including links to contact them by e-mail or other messaging programs such as Office Communicator.

You may want to consider supplementing the default people search scope and Search Center tab with customized search scopes and tabs for more specific groups of people. You or the SSP administrator should consult the information architecture and site hierarchy to identify key business concepts that might relate to specific groups of people that may be sought out by users across sites. Then you can develop search scopes and people search tabs for those specific groups. You may also use your knowledge of the user profiles you manage to identify other useful groups of people and create additional specific search scopes and search tabs for those groups.

Site collection administrators can get as granular with search as creating site-level search scopes for people who are members of the site collection.

People search planning and configuration also feeds back into user profile planning and management. Planning may reveal individuals or groups of people that you’d like to make easier to find, but properties may not exist that allow these people to be found easily. You can then identify new properties to create and add them to the list of existing and planned properties.