How To Configure Employee Lookup Web Part Series - Part 2

Tagged with: , , , , , ,
Friday, March 9, 2007, 16:26
This news item was posted in Active Directory, Portals, SharePoint Data Store, UI, Web Parts category and has 15 Comments so far.

The Employee Lookup Web Part allows you the ability to search against user profiles that you import from the Active Directory. Its not a process that is real time but does allow you to setup import schedules for incremental changes. In my last post, How To Configure Employee Lookup Web Part Series - Part 1, I walked you through configuring the data connection for user profile import. Now I will walk you through intiating the user profile import from your data connection and then how to include that in your search.

Initiate User Profile Import

I’m assuming you have the data connection to the Active Directory configured and ready to go. Here’s what you need to do now:

  1. In User Profile and Properties, click on Import Schedule and set it up for anytime you require. Go back to User Profile and Properties. NOTE: Import schedules are based on how frequently your company makes changes to employee data.
  2. Click on Start Full Import. From here you can keep refreshing the screen to see the progress. This takes approx. 1 min per 100 user profiles (depending on your server).
  3. Once complete, view the Import Log and filter to see if there were any errors.

You have just uploaded the user profiles from your Active Directory and have setup Incremental Import Schedule for incremental updates to your Active Directory. Now its time to include the user profiles that you have imported into your content sources.

Enabling the Employee Lookup Web Part Search

  1. Go to Shared Services Administration for your SSP
  2. Under Search section click on Search settings
  3. On Configure Search Settings page click on Content sources and crawl schedules
  4. On the Manage Content Sources page, click the arrow to pull up the context sensitive menu next to Local Office SharePoint Server sites
  5. In the drop menu click Start Full Crawl
  6. Verify that crawl started (status changed to Full Crawl) and wait until crawl has completed (status should change to Idle)

Ready To Search?

Well that its, the user profiles are now searchable. The user profiles that you imported should now be a part of the search index. Searching for any name, or other data, will bring up results for those that exist. What you might notice is that many of the properties are not included and only the name and the email addresses were imported. I will continue to build more articles on this and hopefully you find them helpful. Mistakes, errors, suggestions and recommendations are more than welcome.

References:

Related Posts:

  • How To Enable People Search
    • One of my most popular posts on this blog is the How To Configure Employee Lookup Web Part Series with Part 1 explained what the
  • Best SharePoint Posts for March 2007
    • SharePoint Buzz saw 10% growth from February 2007 to March 2007, not nearly the same growth seem from January 2007 to February 2007 which was
  • How To Configure Employee Lookup Web Part Series - Part 1
    • Want to allow users to search / lookup employees through the Active Directory? The Employee Lookup webpart, for a SharePoint 2007 publishing portal, does not
  • Happy 1 Year Anniversary SharePoint Buzz
    • What a year its been! Yesterday, SharePoint Buzz enjoyed its one year anniversary. As my gift to everyone, I posted
  • Back into the Sharing Mode
    • The last month I have been extremely busy: work, contracts, community projects and just enjoying the summer. I have quit my full time
    Both comments and pings are currently closed.

    15 Responses to “How To Configure Employee Lookup Web Part Series - Part 2”

    1. Guido Cosulich said on Monday, March 12, 2007, 7:33

      Hi,
      it’s interesting and works but … I need to have a list containing the name, phone number, email, photo, ecc. of our employee. How can I obtain it, please?
      TIA
      Guido

    2. Karl said on Tuesday, March 20, 2007, 18:53

      Hi,

      Part 1 seems to be broken. I’m getting “Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at D:\Inetpub\Customers\viuxhosting\kdkmedia\sharepointbuzz.com\www\wp-content\plugins\adsense-injection.php:1) in D:\Inetpub\Customers\viuxhosting\kdkmedia\sharepointbuzz.com\www\wp-content\plugins\landingsites13.php on line 190″

      cheers
      Karl

    3. sharepointbuzz said on Tuesday, March 20, 2007, 22:38

      Karl

      Everything is working just fine now. Sometimes the site has a hiccup cause of the server load, just have to try back in five minutes. Let me know if it doesn’t work for you again.

      Peace
      Kanwal

    4. Simon said on Friday, March 23, 2007, 6:09

      Is it possible to have the employee lookup seach on part names?
      e.g. search for
      Phil
      and it brings back
      Phil
      Philip
      Phillip
      etc

    5. sharepointbuzz said on Friday, March 23, 2007, 10:46

      As you state in your example, there is no out of the box support for wild card search in SharePoint 2007. However, you can achieve that using custom development.

    6. puneetn said on Sunday, March 25, 2007, 17:28

      Well actually you can get prefix match OOB. Though it isnt necessarily exposed appropriately.
      Say you have a managed property FirstName and you search for FirstName:phil it will bring back Phil, Philip etc.
      Prefix match is not done for FirstName:”Phil” (notice the quotes which tells it that this is an exact phrase match). Unfortunately the search options UI uses the quotes which prevents prefix matches.

    7. Ryan Boyle said on Thursday, March 29, 2007, 23:04

      GREAT Article!!! — Helped me out tremendously!

      One quick ? for you however. I need to be able to pull more information from AD when SharePoint does the import (such as Address, City, St, etc.)

      Where would I set these parameters up at. Other then that I’m golden right now!

      Thanks again for the great article — this was the only thing i was missing up untill 5 min ago

      Boyle!

    8. Judy Z said on Friday, May 4, 2007, 14:08

      You write in the article that “many of the properties are not included and only the name and the email addresses were imported” - We are having trouble getting the members of an Active Directory security group to update. Are these the properties that are not included in the Active Directory update in MOSS 2007? If so, what can be done, as these are very important?

    9. venkat said on Tuesday, May 15, 2007, 7:31

      Hi, the article was very useful to configure. But for me, still the web part is not working. It is saying ‘page not found’ though the page exists in my system. The target path in the web part is /searchcenter/Pages/peopleresults.aspx. Can anyone pls help me…

    10. Penny said on Wednesday, May 16, 2007, 15:41

      Did anyone figure out how to show a scrollable list of AD users as a web part or just a list? We are successfully importing from AD and can search profiles but would like a list as well.

      Thanks in advance!

      Penny

    11. sharepointbuzz said on Friday, May 25, 2007, 0:43

      Puneetn - thanks for your comment
      Ryan Boyle - not sure if you have had a chance to import user profiles as on the same page you can define other properties / meta data to import. If you dont know where, leave a comment and I will get back to you ASAP

      Judy Z - Just as Ryan requested, you have to make sure all groups are included. This depends on your content source definition and what OUs you are pulling in
      Venkat - after following this article, word per word, are you still have problems?

      Penny - creating a scrollable list or a printable list can be easily achieved as the information is in the database

    12. Wim said on Wednesday, June 6, 2007, 3:37

      I need URGENT assistance. Refer to reply no 1 by Guido -
      I need to setup a page or webpart that can display the following by Friday 08 June

      1) Employee name & Surname
      2) Telephone & fax numbers
      3) E-mail address
      4) Maybe add a photograph
      5) If possible a “Notes” section that specifies - Years of experience, fields of practice, etc

      The employee data must be filtered / pulled in from Active Directory. I have successfully setup the connection as stipulated in this article.
      PLEASE if anyone can help.

      Ciao!
      Wim

    13. Sriram said on Monday, July 2, 2007, 18:29

      Looks like this is not applicable to WSS 3.0 (or is it?)…

    14. pitbullblonde said on Thursday, September 13, 2007, 13:47

      I’m having a different issue with Employee Lookup - I get page not found when I use it - but the search tab on top works, and the search link on the left of the page works. The two that work go to:

      http://ajsp01/sites/ApacheJunction/SearchCenter/Pages/peopleresults.aspx?k=corey

      the employee lookup webpart goes to:

      http://ajsp01/searchcenter/Pages/peopleresults.aspx?k=corey

      which results in page not found. Not sure why all the search links aren’t going to the same url….When I go in to modify the web part, under the Advanced section, under Import Error Message it says ‘Canot import this web part’. This is on my portal using the collaboration portal site template.

      I’ve already done the AD import, and searching for employees works fine with the search page at:

      http://ajsp01/sites/ApacheJunction/SearchCenter/Pages/default.aspx

      which I get to using the search link on the left or the search tab at the top of the page.

      Any ideas on what caused this to happen or how to fix it?

    15. How To Enable People Search - How To Enable People SearchSharepoint BUZZ said on Tuesday, January 22, 2008, 12:18

      [...] lookup web part is, configuring user profile import and defining the AD data connection. While Part 2 walked the administrator thru initiating user profile import and enabling the employee lookup web [...]

    Recommended Watching For March 2007
    Daylight Saving Time - A Friendly Reminder