Want to allow users to search / lookup employees through the Active Directory? The Employee Lookup webpart, for a SharePoint 2007 publishing portal, does not work right out of the box - as it needs to be configured. As I continue learning and start sharing my experiences with the SharePoint community, I thought I’d share my notes on how to get the Employee Lookup Web Part working. A client I had worked for a few months ago, was for some reason or another, using an Excel sheet for searching and maintaining phone numbers and company information. I recommended and configured the Employee Lookup webpart to pull data from the Active Directory.
What is the Employee Lookup Web Part?
The Employee Lookup Web Part allows you to search your company’s active directory for contact information. Advanced search fields that are provided are First and Last Name, Department, Title, Responsbilities, Skills and Memeberships. This web part works once you define the Active Directory to import user profiles from (thanks Puneet). This tutorial will walk you through importing user profiles from Active Directory and populating the web part so users can perform searches against the data.
Before importing user profiles, you must configure profile import settings. First, you set up an import account for a specific server running the Active Directory directory service (or Lightweight Directory Access Protocol). Then you enable and schedule full or incremental imports. [source: MOSS 2007 Central Administration Help]
Configuring User Profile Import
- From Central Administration, go to the Shared Services Administration site
- Click on User Profile and Properties under User Profiles and Properties section.
NOTE: This page takes care of importing profiles and logs related to the import - Under Profile and Import Settings, click on Configure Profile Import
NOTE: This page is used to configure settings for importing user profiles from Active Directory or LDAP compliant directory service.
Before we configure the user profile import, the data connection has to be defined. You should consider using a Active Directory or LDAP browsing utility.
A utility that I have started using is Softerra’s LDAP Browser, a lightweight utlity to browse our company’s Active Directory. It does the job that’s required, but if there is an alternative that you can recommend, please let me know in the comments.
Defining a Data Connection
- Click on View Import Connections in Configure Profile Import to define a source for the user profiles
- Click on Create New Connection
- In the Add Connection screen, input the following properties:
- Connection Settings
- Type: Active Directory
- Domain Name: <your domain name>
- Select Auto discover domain controller or Specify a domain controller (pick from drop down list)
- Port: 389 <default AD port>
- Time out (in seconds): 120 <default time out>
- Select Enable Server Side Incremental so that you can increase user profile import efficiency
- Search Settings
- Click on Auto Fill Root Search Base or specify yourself in the Search base
- User Filter: use this to specify which profiles are imported by using LDAP query
- Scope Level: are the user profiles imported only from the first level of the subtree or from the entire subtree?
- Page size: limit the amount of data that is imported for each page
- Page time out: limit the amount of time spent attempting to access a server that is not responding
- Authentication Information
-
Specify the credentials with which you want to connect to the directory service. Pretty self explanatory.
Click on Ok once you are done.
NOTE: If these settings are not correct, then this page will provide you with an error message. -
- Connection Settings
- You will be automatically taken back to the View Import Connections once the connection has been successful.
Tomorrow we will complete our 2 part series and hopefully be able to provide you a sound tutorial on configuring the Employee Lookup Web Part. For all the experts out there and those that have experience with setting up the Employee Lookup web part, why not share with the community some tips and tricks. Is there a best practice on setting up data connections? Will I face further issues with the setup that I currently have? Is there a better alternative to the Softerra LDAP Browser?
puneetn wrote,
“Essentially, this is a web part with a data connection to the active directory. If you would like more information on that, then read the Connect data in Web Parts page for SharePoint 2007 (link at the end of the article).”
This is not how it works conceptually. The link that you mention is for connecting 2 or more webparts not a webpart to data source(Active directory in this case). The way it works is you import data from Active Directory to User Profile database. This in turn gets crawled by search like any other content(albeit using a different protocol handler which is not important for the discussion here). So when you type a query in your employee lookup search box you will be going against search database and index to get your results just like any other search query. If stuff gets updated in AD it will need to be reimported(this can be done incrementally) and recrawled(this can be done incrementally as well) to get updated results in your search results.
-Puneet
| Link | March 8th, 2007 at 9:43 pm
sharepointbuzz wrote,
Thank you Puneet. I have updated the blog post. Would anyone know what resources are available for the Employee Lookup webpart?
| Link | March 8th, 2007 at 10:51 pm
How To Configure Employee Lookup Web Part Series - Part 2 » Sharepoint BUZZ - Blogging the Best of SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) wrote,
[...] 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 part 1, I walked you through configuring the data connection for user profile import. Now I will walk you [...]
| Link | March 9th, 2007 at 4:26 pm
Dayalu.G wrote,
I didn’t find the option mentioned below, pl. help
Click on User Profile and Properties under User Profiles and Properties section
| Link | June 4th, 2007 at 8:02 am
sharepointbuzz wrote,
From Central Administration, click on the Shared Services Administration site
| Link | June 8th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
MikeR wrote,
Hi,
Is this possible or is there an alternative way of achieving this using sharepoint 3.0?
| Link | July 4th, 2007 at 10:36 am
Mike S wrote,
Great post. Is it possible to query more than one location in AD? The root search base only allows one entry. In our domain structure we have two OUs with users to draw profiles from. ContainerA off the root has a users OU and ContainerB off the root has users. Is there a string that can pull profiles from users in both?
Thanks
| Link | July 18th, 2007 at 2:44 pm
sharepointbuzz wrote,
Mike S … you can query of more than one location in AD. However, that might require an another AD profile import configuration
| Link | July 20th, 2007 at 9:36 pm
Joke wrote,
Hai Sharepointbuzz,
We have a simular question like Mike S had.
We have a AD with different OU starting from te root. In our sharepoint, only two OU should have acces to the portal. How can we realize this?
And how can we configure another AD configuration?
Thanks!
| Link | August 3rd, 2007 at 9:36 am
How To Enable People Search - How To Enable People SearchSharepoint BUZZ wrote,
[...] with SharePoint 2007. Go ahead, subscribe to our feed!One of my most popular posts on this is the How To Configure Employee Lookup Web Part Series with Part 1 explained what the employee lookup web part is, configuring user profile import and [...]
| Link | January 22nd, 2008 at 11:49 am