Directory of Users

T845

Hello,

I'm new to Sharepoint 2007. I'm helping an originization who has it installed. They would like to pull the User/Employee/Profile information via a search. They would like to search on first name or last name, title, etc. and pull up a list of Users matching the search. Having the name and picture of the User in the list and then to be able to go to an individual profile info page by click an entry in the list. Is this available with Sharpoint 2007 right out of the box Can I develop in Asp .Net If so do I hit a SQL Server table or should I use some kind of Sharepoint object class

Any help to get me started would be most appreciated.

Thanks,
T.

Kai Sheng

Are you on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) MOSS 2007 comes with People Search capability out-of-the-box, where you could:

• Import user information from Active Directory (AD) to the User Profiles of MOSS 2007
• Search into the User Profiles for User Profile fields like First Name, Last Name, Phone Number etc.
• Allow users to update their own profile from their My Site (personal site)
• Control which fields of the profile that a user could update (including their pictures)

After you have complete the configuration of the user profile import accordingly, you should be able to obtain a list of users from the following URL: https://<your top-level site URL>/_layouts/people.aspx

The view from the URL above might not be the most user-friendly, hence you could further extend this "user directory" concept by using ASP.NET or Web Parts, where you could extract information from the SharePoint User Profiles and present it in a format that you want. This would require some programming work using the object model of SharePoint though.

T845

Thanks for the reply. I'll look into the native search. I know they would really like the picture with the profile search results. Hopefully that can be done. I've seen post that object model is the way to go. Is there any major reason for not writing a simple aspx search page to hit the DB directly It just seems that would be much easier. Looks like it is going to be a bear to get a development enviroment setup.

Thanks,
T.

Kai Sheng

It's the User Profile that you need to setup first before getting the People Search to work.

The main reason that I know of for not hitting the database direcly is because to understand the database schema itself is a tougher job to do than to churn out object model codes probably due to the lack of resources on this. I guess the lack of such resources is probably intended by Microsoft to encourage the use of object model to interact with SharePoint than to mess with its database, that could be potentially risky.