[Update] Please note that this solution does not quite get to a full address book search. When Microsoft says ‘Sort by name’, they actually only sort by first name. Daft I know but go complain to them.  The best approach is to add a note for people – add at least the first letter of each name if possible, e.g. search for First name: Cla, Last name: P. That usually ensures all possible matches are listed on the first page.  I did have a workaround for SharePoint 2007 that also sorted by last name, but it only worked per page, i.e. per 50 results which also is not ideal.

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This post applies to: SharePoint Server 2010, Standard or Enterprise edition. (Requires User Profile Service). It does not apply to SharePoint Foundation Service or FAST.

SharePoint Server includes people in search results. This is great if you’re looking for expertise in a given subject. Results are based on the content of user profiles, which can be a mix of formal information – organisation hierarchy, name, contact details etc. and informal stuff – skills, hobbies, interests etc.

However, what SharePoint does not do straight out of the box is provide address book style staff directory searches. If you are searching specifically for a person, you have to spell their name precisely or phonetically. This post will walk through setting up staff search where you can enter all or part of a name (e.g. show me names beginning ‘Sm’) with results displayed alphabetically.

Preparation

To set-up staff directory search, you first need to have configured a search site using one of the built-in Search site templates available with SharePoint Server 2010 Standard and Enterprise edition. I recommend the Enterprise Search Center site template, it’s available in SharePoint Server Standard and Enterprise edtions (yes, Microsoft has habit of mixing up what the word Enterprise applies to).

For help with setting up the search site, see the following blog post: SharePoint 2010 Search Set-up

Create the Staff Directory search tabs and results page

Instead of using the standard People results page that comes with the Enterprise Search site, we’re going to add an additional tab and results page called Staff Directory. Note: you could just modify the People page, I prefer to use a separate one and leave People for finding expertise.

First we need to create the page we are going to display staff directory search results:

1. Navigate to the search site
2. Go to Site Actions – View All Site Content
3. In All Site Content, under Document Libraries, click on Pages
4. In the Pages library, click on the Documents tab at the top of the page, click on New Document and select Welcome Page
   
5. To create the page:
   - Enter a title: Staff Directory
   - URL: staffresults
   - Select the page layout: (Welcome Page) People Search results, and click Create
   
6. The page will be checked out, check it in and publish as a major version (1.0). There’s still some work to do but we’ll be editing it later…

Second, we need to create tabs to make it easy to navigate to the page:

1. Go back to Site Actions – View All Site Content
2. In All Site Content, under Lists, click on Tabs in Search Pages
3. Click Add New Item and enter the Tab Name: Staff Directory and Page: staffresults.aspx
   You must use the same page name that you just created. You don’t need to enter the full URL, just the page name, the list points directly at the Pages library.
4. Repeate steps 1 – 3, but this time select the list Tabs in Search Results

The end result: Your search site now has a dedicated tab and search results page for your staff directory:

Create the Staff Directory Search Box

The following can be done on any page on any site but let’s assume you want it on the Intranet home page.

1. Add a Content Editor web part to the page
2. Edit the web part to change it’s title to Staff Search
3. Click inside the web part, then in the menu ribbon, click on the HTML icon and choose Edit HTML Source
   Note: You must do this inside a web part and using the HTML Source box for it to work. Otherwise SharePoint will remove the JavaScript when you save the page
4. Insert the following code* inside the HTML Source box:  Replace the URLs to point to your search site and page name. You may want to include the full path, e.g. http://server/… Change the table settings if you want a different size or style of layout.

   <script language="javascript">

   //function for enter on keyboard and apostrophes in search strings

   function txtWildPeopleFinder_KeyDown(e)

   {
   if (e.keyCode == 13 || e.keyCode==10)
   {
   e.returnValue=false;
   DoWildPeopleSearch();
   return false;
   }
   else
   return true;

   }

   function escapestr(str)

   {
   return str.replace("'","%22");
   }

   //staff search

   function DoWildPeopleSearch()

   {
   var firstname = escapestr(document.all["firstname"].value);
   var lastname = escapestr(document.all["lastname"].value);
   var url;

   //search on last name onnly (first name is empty)

   if(firstname == "")

   {
   url = "/search/Pages/staffresults.aspx?k=LastName%3A" + lastname;
   window.location=url;
   return;
   }

   //search on first name only (last name is empty)

   if(lastname == "")

   {
   url = "/search/Pages/staffresults.aspx?k=FirstName%3A" + firstname;
   window.location=url;
   return;
   }

   //search on first and last
   url = "/search/Pages/staffresults.aspx?k=lastname%3A" + lastname +
   "%20FirstName%3A" + firstname;
   window.location=url;
   return;
   }
   </script>
   
   <table width="100%" id="StaffSearchTable" border="0" cellspacing="0"
   cellpadding="4"><tbody>
   <tr><td width="80" nowrap="nowrap">First Name:</td>
   <td width="100%"><input name="firstname" id="firstname"
   onkeydown="txtWildPeopleFinder_KeyDown(event)" type="text" size="25"
   maxlength="55"/></td></tr>
   <tr><td width="80" nowrap="nowrap">Last Name:</td>
   <td><input name="lastname" id="lastname"
   onkeydown="txtWildPeopleFinder_KeyDown(event)"
   type="text" size="25" maxlength="55"/> </td></tr>
   <tr><td></td>
   <td><input onclick="DoWildPeopleSearch()" type="button" value="Search"/></td></tr>
   </tbody></table>
   <p>Enter all or part of a name<br/>e.g. A will find all names beginning with A</p>

5. Click OK. If you are confident you’ve got the code right, now woud be a good time to export this web part. SharePoint is very fussy about using JavaScript and if you try to edit it at a later date, it may break. Export and then import to the web part gallery to make it easy to just add it back in at a later date. If you’ve made an error, delete the web part and start again from scratch.
6. Once done, save the page and you should now have a web part that looks something like this:
   
7. Test the web part to make sure you entered the correct URLs for the search page. Assuming you did, stay on the Staff Directory results page, ready for the next step.

Note. The code creates a layout using a table. If this offends your design sensabilities, by all means insert DIVs and appropriate HTML code to create a properly formatted AAA-compliant box. (p.s. it still won’t be compliant if you’re using a web part zone because the zones use tables in the page layout…)

* I’d love to take full credit for this code but somebody else wrote the original. I’ve had it for years and can’t remember if I got one of the Devs to help or found it via Google. There’s quite possibly a better way of writing it.

Modifying the Staff Directory results page

The final step is to edit the Staff Directory results page. If you’re not already looking at the page, navigate to it now.

The image above shows the default People search results page. You can see the search parameters in the search box – I searched for everyone with a last name beginnning G. But look at the results. They are not in alpahebetical order. We’re going to replace the default search box with our staff directory search and change the way the results are displayed.

1. Edit the staffresults.aspx page
2. Delete the web part called People Search Box
3. If you exported/imported your Staff Search web part earlier, now add it to the Top Zone of the page
4. Edit the web part settings and under Appearance, change the Chrome to None (to hide the title and borders)
5. Click inside the web part content and click the HTML icon to Edit HTML Source. The code is identical to the before but we are going to use a different table layout. Replace your TABLE section with the following:

   <table id="StaffSearch" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="3">
   <tbody><tr><td width="80" nowrap="nowrap">First Name:</td>
   <td width="180"><input name="firstname" id="firstname"
   onkeydown="txtWildPeopleFinder_KeyDown(event)" type="text" size="20"
   maxlength="100"/> </td>
   <td width="80" nowrap="nowrap">Last Name:</td>
   <td width="180"><input name="lastname" id="lastname"
   onkeydown="txtWildPeopleFinder_KeyDown(event)" type="text" size="20"
   maxlength="100"/> </td>
   <td><input onclick="DoWildPeopleSearch()" type="button" value="Search"/>
   </td></tr></tbody></table>

6. Click OK and save the page. Then click Edit to edit it again.
7. Find the People Search Core Results web part and edit the web part settings
   - Expand the Display Properties section
   - Under Default Results Sorting, change it from ‘Default’ to ‘Name
   - You can also modify other settings, such as number of results per page, size of summary and URL
   - Click Apply/OK to save the changes to the web part settings. Save and publish the page

And there you have it, staff directory search in an address book format with results listed alphabetically by surname.

There are some other tweaks that I often do, such as adding department to the search box as a dropdown list (requires very accurate data in your AD – i.e. consistent department names) and adding additional properties to the search results such as mobile phone, alternate contact (again, is dependent on the data being available in the profile). But this should get you started.

Final note: It is possible to use the code here and create a staff directory search in SharePoint Server 2007. The complication comes from not having a built-in capability to display results by name. You can set-it up but with a huge limitation – it sorts alphabetically by results page and you can’t have more than 50 items per page. Also, the people results in SharePoint 2007 look terrible. You can make them look more like a business-card style results layout but it takes quite a bit of tweaking using XML. If there’s demand in the comments for it, I’ll dig out my old notes…

This post is part of the SharePoint 2010 Handbook: Enterprise Search

If you’ve ever sat through a SharePoint Server 2007 presentation, chances are you have seen a slide with a circle divided into six segments. The slide is used to position SharePoint as a platform for six different types of solution: collaboration, portal, search, content management, business processes and business intelligence.

What we are beginning to see from Microsoft are vertical solutions that focus on one segment, with SharePoint providing the base platform and additional products (either Microsoft’s, other software vendors or home-brewed code) delivering more advanced features. The image below shows my version of the pie, customising the six segments with some additions:

Looking purely at Microsoft’s own products. PerformancePoint Server (including the ProClarity acquisition) expands the business intelligence capabilities. Biztalk Server comes out to play when you want transaction-oriented workflows to automate your business processes. The Groove acquisition, as well as providing Microsoft with a replacement for Bill Gates, complements collaboration by providing offline, synchronisation and cross-firewall capabilities. That space is also crowded by Exchange Server and Office Communications Server offering the required communication elements. If the FAST acquisition does go ahead, then the search segment gets its own toy to play with. I resisted temptation to put Facebook in as a possible future expansion to the portal piece of the pie… On a serious note, Office Live ought to be in that segment but the strategy remains fuzzy.

At the moment, content management looks the poor relation. Web content management features are hindered by a lack of support for accessibility standards (there is now a free toolkit available for download to assist). The very definition of content management remains fluid (it can span collaboration, electronic documents and records management, as well as web content). And new formats are emerging too that will need consideration – wikis, blogs and social networks. SharePoint has the basics to support them all – version history, workflow, check-in/out, metadata – but there is a lack of information architecture that is crying out to fill the vacant purple slot.

I am often asked how likely it is that an organisation will need additional products or bespoke development to tailor SharePoint for a given project – i.e. does the solution need to be SharePoint + ? It is a simplistic explanation but if you start at the Collaboration segment and work clockwise around the pie, the segments decrease in terms of product maturity and advanced features. Hence, as you work around the pie, the likelihood of requiring bespoke development and/or additional software increases.

Filed under: SharePoint – Overview

Technorati tags: MOSS 2007; SharePoint

When running SharePoint workshops, one question inevitably crops up:

¨What doesn’t come out of the box?¨

The length of the answer depends on the circumstances but, when talking about optional extras, it seems that plenty of people don’t know about Codeplex. Codeplex is Microsoft’s Open Source Projects hosting site, where solutions are posted that typically provide enhancements to products at no extra cost. And SharePoint has a few friends there.

Go check out Codeplex and do a search on SharePoint if you are curious about the types of extras available. Here are 5 for starters:

Projects listed on CodePlex but not yet released include: Community Kit (for building community-driven portals) and Accessibility Kit (web site templates that follow W3C Web Content Accessibilty Guidelines 1.0).

Filed under: SharePoint: Add-ons

Technorati tags: SharePoint 2007; MOSS 2007