Manage search scopes for people search (Office SharePoint Server 2007)

Article
01/10/2017

Applies To: Office SharePoint Server 2007

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Topic Last Modified: 2009-06-09

You use people search functionality in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to enable users to find people not only by department or job title but also by the expertise that resides in other people and by common interests. Search scopes filter and focus search queries to a specific subset of information in the content index. Users can select a search scope when they perform a search in order to target search results to a particular part of the content index. Typically, search scopes include specific topics and content sources that are important and common to users in the organization.

In this article:

About search scopes
Define search scopes
Manage metadata property mappings
Index properties to be used in the search scope
Update the search scope
Task requirements

About search scopes

Search scopes in Office SharePoint Server 2007 enable users to narrow the search results that are returned when they execute a search query. The default search scope for people search is a global search. You can also create additional scopes for people search that are customized to search at the global or site-collection level. You can use different rules in the definition of a search scope, from scoping based on a content source to more complex scoping with conditions using custom metadata.

Define search scopes

Search scopes, also known as scopes, can be defined at the Shared Services Provider (SSP) level or at the site-collection level. By default, search scopes configured at the SSP level, also known as global scopes, are available to all site collections on all Web applications associated with that SSP. However, site collection administrators can define site collection-level search scopes that apply only to sites in a given site collection. Both of these kinds of search scopes are completely configurable and can be used by both the People Search Web Part and the Advanced Search Web Part to trim search results.

For ease of maintenance and centralized administration, you probably want to implement the people search scope at the global SSP level. We recommend building global search scopes for people search instead of site-collection level search scopes.

You also must associate the search scope with an existing display group, or you can create a new display group for it. A display group is a layer between the actual search scopes and the control that displays the search scopes to the user. A search scope is not displayed in the controls in the SharePoint pages unless it is associated to a corresponding display group. If you create a new display group, you can configure it as you want to use only one specific search scope, limiting the search results displayed to the user.

For more information, see Plan the end-user search experience (Office SharePoint Server).

Manage metadata property mappings

When content repositories are crawled, the properties discovered by the crawler, also known as crawled properties, are added to the Metadata Property Mappings page of the associated SSP. Some properties are mapped to the names of properties that are to be used in search queries, see comment. A search service administrator can map additional crawled properties to managed properties. By mapping the crawled properties to these managed properties, you reduce the number of property names that are displayed to end users.

For example, different directories, such as Active Directory directory services and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), might have different names in user profiles for the property that identifies the user’s role within the organization. One directory source might name this property "role," another "job," and a third "job title". You can map each of these crawled properties to the "role" managed property so that when a user queries by "role", appropriate results from all the user profiles are included in the results. Searches can be performed only on managed properties, not on crawled properties.

Index properties to be used in the search scope

Search scopes define the items in the index against which a search query is run. The properties selected for use in a search scope must be set to Indexed to be included in the search scope crawl.

Update the search scope

After the search scope is created, the metadata property mapped and the scope properties indexed, the scope must be updated to make the data available to the user for a people search.

Task requirements

For the first procedure in the following list, Create a search scope for people search (Office SharePoint Server 2007), to create global-level search scopes, you must be a member of the Viewers SharePoint group on the Shared Services Administration site. To create site-collection-level search scopes, you must be a site collection administrator on the site collection that will contain the Search Center for which you are creating the scope, scope rules, and display group.

To complete the other procedures in the list for this task, membership in the Viewers SharePoint group on the Shared Services Administration site is the minimum required. Membership in the Farm Administrators SharePoint group is insufficient to perform these procedures.

To add, edit, or delete a managed property, see the "Adding a managed property", "Editing a managed property" and "Deleting a managed property" procedures in Manage metadata property mappings (Office SharePoint Server)

To create search scopes for people search, you perform these procedures in the following order: