Manage user profiles for people search (Office SharePoint Server 2007)

Article
01/10/2017

Applies To: Office SharePoint Server 2007

This Office product will reach end of support on October 10, 2017. To stay supported, you will need to upgrade. For more information, see , Resources to help you upgrade your Office 2007 servers and clients.

Topic Last Modified: 2016-11-14

You use people search capabilities in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to enable users to find people not only by department or job title but also by expertise and common interests. This information is stored in user profiles, which organize and display all of the properties related to each user together with documents and other items related to that user.

In this article:

About user profiles and user profile properties
Manage user profiles and user profile properties
Default import of user profiles
Customize the import of user profiles
Import user profiles
Add, edit, and map user profile properties
Crawl user profiles
Perform a full or incremental crawl
Verify results of the crawl
Task requirements

About user profiles and user profile properties

Each user profile contains information about one user. User profile properties are name/value pairs attached to user profiles that provide personal information about the user. The user profile store contains a list of user profile property information, which is obtained by importing it from a directory that contains user accounts, or manually by typing the account information into the user profile store. By default, Office SharePoint Server 2007 can import from the Active Directory directory service, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) servers, and from line-of-business (LOB) applications registered in the Business Data Catalog.

Manage user profiles and user profile properties

Administrators manage the list of user profiles, the list of properties displayed in all user profiles, and the values for properties in individual profiles.

User profiles contain an organized list of properties about users in your organization. Many of these properties are included automatically when user profiles are first imported using connections to directory services, such as Active Directory directory service or LDAP.

By default, Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides a set of frequently used user profile properties.

Sometimes these user profile properties are insufficient, and you might need additional properties. In such cases, you can create new user profile properties and map them to existing properties in directory services or to properties in LOB applications registered in the Business Data Catalog. The new user profile properties are then available for all user profiles. Administrators and users can edit values for all properties, depending on the personalization policy for each property.

Profile properties can include items such as the following:

First name
Last name
User name
Work phone
Office location
Department

Some properties, such as User name and Work phone, are mapped to properties in Active Directory directory service and LDAP services.

Default import of user profiles

By default, unless configured differently, Office SharePoint Server 2007 automatically detects the domain controller and imports the user information from the Active Directory directory service. If you import Active Directory data from the current domain or from the entire forest for the current domain, you do not have to separately add and configure import connections.

Customize the import of user profiles

You can customize the data source configuration settings to import from a domain controller that hosts Active Directory directory service, an LDAP server, or the Business Data Catalog.

If you have to connect to data in LDAP directory services, multiple domains, or forests, or from an LOB system through the Business Data Catalog, you must add and configure each of these connections separately.

Data is imported from all connected sources at the same time. Full imports include all data in user profiles. Incremental imports include only the user profiles added since the last import.

Import user profiles

You can import user profile information from directory connections. By doing this, you can save time when you enter user information for every user in your organization.

Once user profiles are added or imported, you can update information by editing each user profile.

You can add new profiles by using the default user profile template. The template includes fields for adding information about the user; for example, a personal description expressing what the user wants other users to know, a picture, current responsibilities, skills used to perform the job or previous projects, information about previous projects, business-related interests, and so on.

Editing a user profile does not change the set of properties displayed in that user profile. To change the properties, you must add, edit, or delete the individual profile properties from the default user profile.

Add, edit and map user profile properties

The set of properties that are included in the user profile might not contain all of the information about users in your organization that you want to include on the site. You can add new properties to enhance those included in the user profile. You can also edit existing properties to change the way those properties are displayed in the user profile. You can also map properties in user profiles to properties in the Active Directory directory service.

Important

When you add or edit a property mapping, you must run a full import operation before the changes take effect.

Crawl user profiles

After the import is complete and user profiles are created, the user profiles must be crawled. Crawling user profiles brings the user profile properties into the search system so that the information in the user profiles can be searched.

Search in Office SharePoint Server 2007 determines which content to crawl based on the content sources configured in the search settings. When you configure or edit the Local Office SharePoint Server Sites content source, you see that two start addresses are associated with this content source and that they have different URL prefixes: HTTP and SPS3. By default, the HTTP prefix points to a Web application in the farm. The SPS3 prefix is hard-coded to direct Search to crawl the user store associated with the SSP.

To add a new content source for use in a people search crawl, create or add the SPS3://<hostname> start address to a SharePoint content source, where <hostname> is the URL to the SSP host server or the address to any Web application in the SSP. See About content sources (Office SharePoint Server 2007) for detailed information.

Perform a full or incremental crawl

You can perform two kinds of crawls in Office SharePoint Server 2007: full crawls and incremental crawls.

The full crawl crawls all content in the content source regardless of whether that content currently resides in the content index.
The incremental crawl only crawls content that is new or updated since the last crawl (incremental or full). If a full crawl has never been completed on a content source and an incremental crawl is initiated, a full crawl is initiated by default. Office SharePoint Server 2007 logs any changes in content that have occurred since the last crawl. The incremental crawl uses this change log to determine which content was crawled and crawl only content that has changed or was added since the last crawl.

For more information about full and incremental crawls, see Plan to crawl content (Office SharePoint Server).

Verify results of the crawl

There are two methods that you can use to verify the results of the crawl. Use both methods to ensure that the user profile properties were correctly imported, and that the search results page displays the correct, expected results for your organization:

Use the import log to review the crawl. The import log filters the view of the crawl log to include only information about the content sources used while user profiles are crawled. The import log is also used to troubleshoot issues that occur while user profiles are crawled. The import log displays a complete list of log messages for the content sources used to crawl user profiles.
Perform a people search in the Search Center that was configured to use the search scope for people search, to ensure that the search results page displays the correct, expected results for your organization.

Task requirements

The following is required to perform the procedures for this task:

Membership in the Viewers SharePoint group on the Shared Services Administration site is the minimum required to complete these procedures. Membership in the Farm Administrators SharePoint group is insufficient to perform these procedures.

The following procedures to create user profiles are performed in the order listed:

For additional information about user profiles, see the section “Configure user profiles and people search” in Configure forms-based authentication (Office SharePoint Server) (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=149721).

The following procedures related to managing user profile import connections may be performed as needed:

The following procedures related to managing user profiles may be performed as needed:

The following procedures related to managing user profile properties may be performed as needed: