7/06/2010

SharePoint: A Better People and Groups View

 

Customize the SharePoint People Views

SharePoint All People and Group views are a bit light weight. If you want to know someone’s phone number you have to click their name and wait for another page to load, or to see if they are a Site Collection Administrator you have to visit another screen. Normally we would just click the View dropdown and click Modify View or Create View, but the View menu here only has:

   image

Won’t it be nice if you could add more columns, or even group, sort or filter the list of users???

 

Fields Available

Turns out you can create your own views of People and you have 35 fields to choose from including both SharePoint and user profile data: (Items in the default views are in bold)

 

About me
Account
Attachment
Content Type
Content Type
Create
Created By
Deleted
Department
Edit (Edit)
Edit (link to edit item)
First name

ID
Is Site Admin
Last name
Modified
Modified By
Name
Name (linked to item with edit menu)
Name (linked to item)
Name (with picture and details)
Name (with picture)
Name (with presence)
Office

Picture
Responsibilities
Selection Checkbox (checkboxes) 
SIP Address
Title
Type (icon linked to document)
User name
Version
Web site
Work e-mail
Work phone

 

SharePoint 2010 adds: Mobile Phone

 

 

This is the default “Details” view:

 

image

 

To customize people views:

  • Go to the top level site in the site collection (important!)
  • Go to People and Groups (or Site Actions, Site Permissions in 2010) and click on any group, including All People (they all share the same views)
  • Go to Settings, List Settings and scroll down to the Views section.

image

  • Click Create View (Rather than changing the exiting views you probably should create a new view)
  • Select your view options like any other view
  • Optional: set sort, group, filter and other View options
  • Save the changes
  • Note: This will leave you in the new view, but the View dropdown will not be displayed, return to People and Groups (or Site Actions, Site Permissions in 2010)  and the view will be displayed correctly

 

 

Here is a customized view:

 

image

 

And the View dropdown now has your new view:

image

 

Here’s a SharePoint 2010 example with grouping by department:

image

 

Enjoy!

 

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18 comments:

KeithV said...

This is terrific, and helpful. Is there a way to modify the new list so it's able to be exported to a spreadsheet, as other lists can? This functionality is not present on the 'Actions' drop down.

Thanks!

Mike Smith said...

Keith,

I started to look into adding Excel export on these "misc" lists a week or two ago, but did not have time to complete it. So, it's on my "interesting things to follow up on" list.

Mike

SeaMonkey said...

I added new fields and created a couple new views, but how do I include as a Web Part with a specific view? I can add Site Users as a Web Part, but I am unable to select any of the views.

Mike Smith said...

> how do I include as a Web Part

Interesting question! I'll look into over the next few days.

Mike Smith said...

SeaMonkey,

I don't see a way to use this as a web part. But, what you can do is display the custom view and add "&IsDlg=1" to the end of the URL. This will display the page without the clutter of the master page - no navigation, ribbon, header, etc. Then take this URL and use it in a Page Viewer Web Part. The result will look much like a normal web part.

Mike

ChuckT said...

I'd love to be able to modify the All Groups list to show permission level, but I don't see a View for this.

Mike Smith said...

Chuck,

The permissions data in not in the user list, so it cannot be displayed in that view.

I have on my to-do list a custom web part (only for SP 2010) that may be able to do this.

Mike

BasT said...

Hi Mike,
thanks for this useful post!
Did you ever get around to complete how to download to Excel?
I am stuck with a list grown out of control with more then 500 members, selecting 'send e-mail' comes back saying too many selected.
Thanks!

Mark said...

I've tried this in MOSS 2007, but the list of "All People" that it returns is not identical to the list of people in either of the default views. There is a vast amount more folks listed. Any ideas why, or how to fix it so the custom view shows the identical list of people?

Anonymous said...

Question: in the SharePoint default view (Added View), we are getting dates that do not acurately coincide with when the user was added to the group?
Does anyone know what the issue could be? Is there a fix for this?

Unknown said...

Mike - You have done it again! I know this is an older post, but you always seem to dig into details others neglect. I was just looking at a user help desk ticket and they weren't sure how a person had edit permissions on a couple of sites. I noticed that the person was not displaying in a view called "Printable Directory" (set as default view) but they did display in "List View" and "Detail View". I reviewed the settings on the "Printable Directory" and there was a filter condition that prevented this user from displaying.

Thanks - Greg Frick

Unknown said...

This was a really useful tip in SP 2010 that helped me a lot. Any idea how to do it in SP2013 - list settings/ribbon are not available but I'd love to modify my "My People" view (which migrated across to 2013 fine) to show more than 30 at a time.

Mark

Mike Smith said...

Mark,

The steps above work for Office 365 and in my SP 2013 on-premises (pre SP1).

Except, when I'm not logged in as a Site Collection Administrator. :-)

Are you accessing the People and Groups page as a Site Collection Administrator?

Mike

Lynn said...

Mike

I love the post I was able to get closer to fixing a view with this but not able to get all the way. I'm using sharepoint 2010 and we have the "users and peoples - groups" page and I would love to edit this view. Do you know where I could edit or a way to create a new view foe user groups.

Thanks

Lynn

Mike Smith said...

Lynn,

If you are asking about this page:

http://yourserver/sites/yoursite/_layouts/groups.aspx

This is not a view. It is an administration page and is not easily customized.

Mike

Shae said...

Mike, you just saved my life with your idea of appending "&IsDlg=1" to get a custom view page that can be displayed in a web part.

I was asked to create a phone list with users, phone numbers, departments, etc., and it just seemed silly to recreate this when I could simply create a view of a SharePoint group that would display info already in AD. Seemed like a brilliant idea until I had trouble displaying it on the desired page. Thanks so much!

Anonymous said...

Mike,

I've been to some of your user's groups and we've done some training there. I must say, EVERY TIME I see a post from you I know it's going to be great info. Thanks for another great solution!

Tim Jones
L-3 Cincinnati Electronics

Anonymous said...

Thank you! This is so helpful and worked perfectly.

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