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:
- 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.
- 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).
- 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
- Go to Shared Services Administration for your SSP
- Under Search section click on Search settings
- On Configure Search Settings page click on Content sources and crawl schedules
- On the Manage Content Sources page, click the arrow to pull up the context sensitive menu next to Local Office SharePoint Server sites
- In the drop menu click Start Full Crawl
- 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.
Guido Cosulich wrote,
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
| Link | March 12th, 2007 at 7:33 am
Karl wrote,
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
| Link | March 20th, 2007 at 6:53 pm
sharepointbuzz wrote,
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
| Link | March 20th, 2007 at 10:38 pm
Simon wrote,
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
| Link | March 23rd, 2007 at 6:09 am
sharepointbuzz wrote,
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.
| Link | March 23rd, 2007 at 10:46 am
puneetn wrote,
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.
| Link | March 25th, 2007 at 5:28 pm
Ryan Boyle wrote,
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!
| Link | March 29th, 2007 at 11:04 pm
Judy Z wrote,
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?
| Link | May 4th, 2007 at 2:08 pm
venkat wrote,
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…
| Link | May 15th, 2007 at 7:31 am
Penny wrote,
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
| Link | May 16th, 2007 at 3:41 pm
sharepointbuzz wrote,
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
| Link | May 25th, 2007 at 12:43 am
Wim wrote,
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
| Link | June 6th, 2007 at 3:37 am
Sriram wrote,
Looks like this is not applicable to WSS 3.0 (or is it?)…
| Link | July 2nd, 2007 at 6:29 pm
pitbullblonde wrote,
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?
| Link | September 13th, 2007 at 1:47 pm
How To Enable People Search - How To Enable People SearchSharepoint BUZZ wrote,
[...] 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 [...]
| Link | January 22nd, 2008 at 12:18 pm