Using People Search Results
As with the All Sites search tab, People search
provides a cluster of information about a person and highlights the
queried keyword within the result. An individual item from the People
search results is shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4. Individual search result in the People search results page
By default, each item in the results provides a
person's name, title, department, and other information about the
displayed person, such as contact information. The name of the person
is actionable and, when clicked, will bring the user to the personal
“MySite” of that person. Unlike the standard All Sites search result,
however, there are many more actions that can be taken on People
results. If configured, a person's MySite acts as a hub of information
about that user and includes expanded information such as contact
information, his or her organizational chart, shared content, tags and
notes on sites, colleagues, and participating memberships, such as
e-mail distribution lists. Much of this information is accessible
directly from the remainder of the search result.
If a person has uploaded a profile
picture, it will be displayed on the result. Between the person's name
and picture, a small square box, acting as a link, provides access to
the user's profile contact card. In SharePoint 2010 a user's profile is
also called a presence. If a user is online, this box will turn green.
Clicking the box will provide an additional set of options such as
contact information, the ability to initiate an e-mail, instant
message, or phone call, or schedule a meeting directly from the results
page. The default actions that are available when clicking the contact
card are shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5. People search contact card
Taking Action on Results
On a default People search page, below the name
and contact information of a person, there are three links. These links
allow the user to take action on the result. The first available action
is the Add to My Colleagues link. Each user's MySite has a page that
supports this action. The end result of taking this action is that the
selected person will be added to a user's Colleagues list on his or her
profile. The Colleagues list is a shared list of colleagues similar to
connections on LinkedIn or friends on Facebook. When choosing to add a
colleague, the user is navigated to a page that allows the user to
select the setting of the relationship. The settings that can be made
include selecting the colleague, adding him or her to a team or group,
and setting the groups that can see the relationship. The Add
Colleagues page is shown in Figure 6.
Figure 6. Adding a new colleague
Selecting the option to Browse in
Organizational Chart will navigate the user to the selected person's
Organization tab on his or her MySite (Figure 7).
If the organizational chart is established for the selected person, the
user can view other people in the person's vertical and lateral
hierarchy. Managers they report to, the people that report to them, and
people at the same level of the hierarchy are displayed. People higher
in the organizational hierarchy are shown above the current person's
contact card, people they work with at the same level are shown to the
left and right of the contact card, and people who report to the person
are shown below the contact card. Using the selected person's contact
card as a starting point, users can navigate through the contacts
related to the person and view his or her contact cards. Users can
continue to follow this structure of organizational hierarchy away from
the initially selected person until they find the related contacts they
may be searching for.
Figure 7. Organization chart
The last option on each result allows the user
to see a brief list of items “about” the person as well as items
authored by the person. When clicking “By person”, a window
opens on the page that displays a list of five items from the All Sites
search and provides the ability to show more results “about” the person
from All Sites search. The list shown under “person” is the top five results that would be returned if the following query was entered into “All Sites” search.
person author:"person"
For example, if the person being actioned in
the result was named Josh Noble, the top five results for the search
query (Josh Noble author: “Josh Noble”) would be returned. This query
returns result items where the person's name is treated as a keyword
and he or she is one of the authors. If the option to show more results
is selected, a second window appears and a search results page is shown
for the full list of results on the corresponding query. The results
page can be treated just like any All Sites search results page. If a
user tabs to more by “person,” then the same actions occur but instead
for the following query.
author:"person"
This query skips looking for items that include
the person as a keyword and returns only items where the person is an
author. Both of these options allow for a convenient social networking
feature to find items related to people, teammates, and colleagues
within an SP2010 environment.
