SharePoint: Search for People using Properties (LastName:smith)

 

The typical SharePoint end user knows less than 1% of the SharePoint Search feature set. In other words, they know how to do a Google search. They just type a word or two, press Enter and hope for the best. Just think what they could do if they just knew a few search properties!

You can really improve search results by adding a Search Administrator to your team and letting them invest an hour or three a week in improving the end-user search experience. Train your end users, add tips to your search pages, create cheat sheets - there’s lots of options.

Just adding a few search tips to the search pages will do wonders:

  

So, let’s take a look at how users can do a better People search…

 

Searching for People

Let’s say I do a search for people using the keyword “training”. I could find people in the Training department, people with the word “training” in About Me, and even people with the last name of “Training”. If you would like to focus your search then you can use the predefined search Managed Properties. For example:

  

While a few of the properties can be used with the equals operator (“=”), most will only return results with the contains operator (“:”). For example, searching for a work phone number using “=” returns nothing. Using “:” will return the person with that number.

  

 

Managed Properties for People Searches

Most of the User Profile properties are searchable in a People search by just typing a keyword in the search box. You can also perform a People search using some of the out of the box Managed Metadata properties that are linked to the User Profile Services properties. In the table below you will find most of the User Profile properties along with the matching search Managed Property names. A few of the properties below have obvious names. A few are wrapped up in a single search property named “ContentHidded”. Some are “indexed” (crawled), but do not have the needed matching Managed Property. For most of those that do not have a matching Managed Property you can manually add a property to the search schema.

I will follow up with an article on adding the missing search Managed Properties.

Property for search	Property name found in the user’s profile	Notes
AccountName	Account Name	Example: accountname:contoso\samc
AboutMe	About Me
Interests	Interests
Responsibility	Ask Me About
FirstName	First name
LastName	Last name
PreferredName	Name	This is the full name. “Mike Smith”
WorkPhone	Work Phone	To find all users in the same area code or a partial number, use wild cards: workphone=513*
JobTitle	Title
WorkEmail	Work Email
MobilePhone	Mobile phone
	Home phone	Mapped to ContentsHidden. Can be mapped to a new Managed Property.
	Fax	Not mapped, but can be. (People:Fax)
Department	Department	This is a String property. This department maps to “Department”
	Department	This is a Managed Metadata property. Not mapped, but can be. (People:SPS-Department)
Schools	Schools
If you see this list	anywhere but on	TechTrainingNotes.blogspot.com, then it was “stolen” and used without permission.
OfficeNumber	Office	Generally used for “room number”.
BaseOfficeLocation	Office Location
PastProjects	Past Project
Skills	Skills
	Manager	Not mapped, but can be. (People:Manager) (returned as domain\username)
	Assistant	Not mapped, but can be. (People:Manager) (returned as domain\username)
	Birthday	Not mapped, but can be. (People:Birthday) (returned as “2000-03-01T00:00:00.0000000Z”)  All birthdays are set for year 2000.
	Hire Date	Not mapped, but can be. (People:SPS-HireDate)
ContentsHidden	(many)	This maps to several crawled properties as a single merged property: People:Office People:SPS-PastProjects People:SPS-School People:WorkPhone People:CellPhone People:Fax People:HomePhone People:SPS-MemberOf People:AboutMe People:OrganizationParentNames

 

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