Configuring People Search in SharePoint 2010

There are a couple of steps needed in order to configure People Search for SharePoint 2010 which are a little bit different than for configuring indexing for other Content Sources.

Assuming that you have already successfully set up the User Profile Synchronization and have user profiles created then you need to do two things:

1) Adding the My Site Location Start Address

Although this is usually done by SharePoint you need to add the start location to a content source so that the search crawler knows where it should be crawling.

The way that the search crawler knows that it will search for user data is by using the sps3 prefix. It’s not a protocol per se but it does instruct the crawler to search for people data.
So go into a content source and add the following line:

sps3://mySiteHostLocation

NOTE: If you are running under HTTPS then you need to enter in sps3s for the start address.

2) Allow crawling account access to the User Profile Store

You also need to allow access to the crawling account to be able to retrieve people data. To do this highlight the User Profile Service Application that contains the people profile, c lick in Administrators,add the crawler account and check the ‘Retrieve People Data for Search Crawlers’ permission.

Then run an incremental crawl and you will have your user My Sites available in search results! To check if there is any values in the index go to your People Search scope and check that there are items within:

Tags: featured, MySite, people search, search, user profiles

Category: How To