Published: November 11, 2010

People search capabilities in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 help users find people by department, job title, expertise, and common interests.

Before you start operations for people search, make sure that you read the following articles, which describe key concepts about the components of people search:

• User Profile service application overview (SharePoint Server 2010). Learn about the User Profile service in SharePoint Server 2010 and managing user profile properties, profile synchronization settings, and other collaboration settings.

• Plan user profiles (SharePoint Server 2010). Plan user profile properties and connections between User Profile services, directory services, and line-of-business applications.

• Plan for profile synchronization (SharePoint Server 2010). Plan to integrate profile information that is stored in a directory service such as Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) or a line-of-business system, such as SAP or Siebel, with SharePoint Server 2010.

• Deploy people search. Learn the prerequisites for people search and how to deploy people search in SharePoint Server 2010.

To administer people search, perform the following procedures as needed:

• Manage search scopes (SharePoint Server 2010) to add or update a scope for people search.

• Manage metadata properties for search (SharePoint Server 2010) to map crawled properties to managed properties for people search.

• Create, edit, or delete a User Profile service application (SharePoint Server 2010) to configure a User Profile service application.

• Assign administration of a User Profile service application (SharePoint Server 2010) to delegate administration from a farm administrator to a service application administrator.

• Assign administration of User Profile service features (SharePoint Server 2010) to delegate specific features from a service application administrator to another user, who then becomes the feature administrator.

• Remove an administrator from a User Profile service application (SharePoint Server 2010) to remove a service application administrator.

• Add, edit, or delete custom properties for a user profile (SharePoint Server 2010) to configure user profile properties.

• Manage audiences (SharePoint Server 2010) to configure audience rules that target content to specific users.

• Manage profile synchronization (SharePoint Server 2010) to synchronize user and group profile information that is stored in the SharePoint Server 2010 profile store with profile information that is stored in directory services and line-of-business systems across the enterprise.

• Manage My Sites settings (SharePoint Server 2010) to configure personal sites that give users a rich set of social networking features.

• Resolve accounts across multiple forests (SharePoint Server 2010) to resolve user accounts in multiple forest environments that have at least a one-way trust between the forests.

• Managing personal and social features (SharePoint Server 2010) to enable or disable social features in SharePoint Server 2010.