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In my last post, I showed you how to create an Enterprise Search page that consisted of both “Site” and “People” searches. Depending on how you have setup your search within Central Administration, you may find the “People” search not returning any results.

Before we start, there are a few things you need to check. Firstly, ensure you have the necessary search services in working order. If you can carry out site searches you should be fine. Secondly, ensure the User Profile service has been setup sufficiently so that features such as MySites and Profile databases are working.

In a straight-forward world, you would think that completing the steps above would be enough for SharePoint 2010 to allow you to search users within your site. But sadly we don’t live in a straight-forward world.

Open Central Administration and navigate to “Manage Service Applications”. Within the list of services, select “Enterprise Search Service Application”.

In the “Enterprise Search Service Application” page, click on the “Content Sources” link you’ll find situated in the left hand navigation and open/edit your “Local SharePoint Sites” content source.

In the Start Addresses section, you will see a box with entries similar to what I have in my SharePoint intranet below..well almost the same:

You will notice the line: “sps3://my-intranet” which tells SharePoint to call a specific web service hosted at that web address. In this case, the URL is the same one I use to access my main site collection. When you have added the “sps3://” line yourself press the “OK” button to save your changes.

There is just one last step we need to carry out: re-indexing our search. Navigate back to the “Enterprise Search Service Application” page and start full crawl.

Once this has completed all your user profiles should now be searchable.

Hooray! My first SharePoint 2010 blog post!

I have been lucky enough to start working on my first SharePoint 2010 project. As you may know, things have definitely moved on from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010. Every new release of SharePoint seems to be a vast improvement over its predecessor that benefits both the end users and developers. But just as things get better and better, you’ll find yourself falling into the common trap of trying to apply what you have learnt in SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010. I know I did.

A good example of this is having a search page that allows users to search “All Sites” or “People”, something we would see in a SharePoint 2007 search page as standard:

I was surprised to find out that this wasn’t the search I would get by default. The SharePoint 2010 search is quite basic and out-of-the-box as you can see from the screenshot below:

In order to get a search page that includes both Site and People search (or as Enterprise Search as SharePoint 2010 now calls it), you have to carry out an additional step that simply requires creating a new site. So, go to “Site Actions” and click on “New Site”. When the popup opens, select the “Search” category and select “Enterprise Search”. Enter a page and name and URL name and click “Create”.

If everything goes well, you should see a search page which looks like something like this:

Cool! So you now have the ability to carry out Site and People searches. But you may find the People search will not work if you carried out the same mistake I did where I missed out a key setting in Central Administration. I will blog about that within the next few days. TO BE CONTINUED...

Post Updated: 30/01/2011 - Enable People Search in SharePoint 2010