At Hyperfish we are passionate about employee profiles and the business benefits realized when profiles are complete and up-to-date.
We have received many requests from our customers, wanting to extend the out of box people search functionality in Microsoft products. It’s for reason we’ve collaborated with industry experts in Microsoft SharePoint and Office 365 to bring you this comprehensive guide to Build your own SharePoint Employee Directory, helping your organization to find people and expertise quickly and easily. The good news is, this solution will work with SharePoint Server 2010 onwards and Office 365 SharePoint Online.
The guide provides:
- Detailed analysis on the out of the box people search functionality available in Outlook, Skype for Business, SharePoint, Delve, and Microsoft Teams;
- Outlines the architecture of People search in both SharePoint Online and SharePoint on-premises;
- Provides you step by step instructions to build an employee directory in Office 365 with a A-Z index navigation in as little as 15 minutes.
Contributors:
What’s covered in the Guide:
Why do we need an employee directory?
This section reiterates that the largest use case of employee directory is people discovery. We take you through the common ways people discovery is undertaken across Microsoft platforms and provide expert tips to support user experience and accurate results.
Out of the box people search experience
Organizations that have invested in Microsoft platform, there are five products that provide people search capability by default; Outlook, Skype for Business, SharePoint, Delve, and Microsoft Teams.
In this section we take you through each product in depth to let you know what is possible in terms of people search with each.
Architecture of SharePoint People Search
People search in SharePoint and Delve relies on information from Active Directory being synchronized to SharePoint, and then indexed into the search engine. In this section we take you through the differences between architecture and syncing of profile information in SharePoint Online vs an On-premises deployment.
Enhancing SharePoint People Search
This step by step guide will help you to enhance your employee directory in SharePoint. It works for SharePoint Server 2013/2016 and SharePoint Online.
Following the indepth steps you will be able to achieve a table like employee directory with a A-Z index navigation (like below).
Further enhancements for employee directory
After achieving your new employee directory, we take you through options to add sorting capability an and improving the refiners.
Future proof solutions
This final section of the guide provides recommendations around methods of modify the visualization of search results to help you future-proof your solutions.