SharePoint People Search – Right from Your Intranet Home Page
Lots of my clients want a quick and easy way to search for people in SharePoint. Unfortunately, it isn’t as simple as it should be.
On any given site, when you use the Search Box in the top right, you land on a search results page which doesn’t even have a People tab. Worse, you get no results representing people.
However, if you click on the Organization part of the breadcrumb, you get a People tab and results based on the search term(s) you have typed.
Better yet, if you click on the People tab, you get only people results, and they are rick people results, with People Cards showing all the details available.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just get people there right away?
Here’s a trick that works. You can add a Quick Link to the home page of any site taking you directly to the People Search. I’m suggesting this on the home page of Intranets at this point – until Microsoft gives us an easy path. (What would collaboration be if we couldn’t find any people?)
This is actually pretty easy, but it requires a small amount of thought. When you create the link in the Quick Links Web Part, it should have a link like this:
[link to the site]/_layouts/15/search.aspx/peopleThe [link to the site] part is important. When you click on the Quick Link, you’d like people to be able to get back to the place from whence they have come. By anchoring the link in the current site, the Exit search link will do that for them.
Adding the link is simple. Just add a new link with a URL like the one above. By default, it won’t be a very pretty button, so change the Title and give it a nice icon.
Here’s a decent way to make it look.
Not too bad, right? You can add one of these Quick Links wherever you’d like to give people easy access to a “find people” function. Just be sure to use the anchor to the current site as the start of the link.
Meanwhile, hey Microsoft – maybe make this easier?
Argh, been looking for a simple people search for ages! Thank you!
Do you know how to exclude Room mailboxes and departed (but not deleted) users from the results?
@RichardP:
I’d talk to your AD and SharePoint admin folks to see how they are managing those types of resources. Good luck.
M.
Did you figure this out? I am interested in the solution you’ve discovered for this.
Hi Marc, nice trick! However when I add this link in quick links to the /_layouts/15/search.aspx/people – the “people page”, and then click the link, I’ll will then go to the page but this page don’t load the content, it’s only partial loads. If I refresh, the content (search result) will be displayed. I tried this in two different tenants, target release. Have you seen this behavior Marc?
@Christian:
I haven’t seen that. Very odd. What part of the page isn’t loading?
M.
Thanks Marc, that’s very helpful for what we are looking for. Like Christian, I have the same experience where it will first load blank and then if I refresh, it will load the list of people.
Great tip Marc. Thanks for bothering to share. I’ll make it part of this weeks #IntraTeamNews and use it for a client.
I hope you’re fine and I’ll see you soon – somewhere. Let me know when you’re in Europe
@Kurt:
Great to hear it’s helpful for you. I just landed in Frankfurt. :-)
M.
Hi Marc, thanks for sharing!
Do you know if it’s possible to add parameters for sorting and filtering? The order people are listed is impossible to understand :)
Mattias S, it appears to me to be the people who you are most frequently in contact with are listed first. This is different for each user.
It appears that this can’t be used on Modern Sites, Sharepoint Online? I’ve not had the greatest experience with MS support on the matter, but People Search returns no users, even though I can use the built-in People web-part. This means I can’t do a structured listing like above.
@Luke:
I’m not sure where your issue is, but this is absolutely for modern sites on SharePoint Online.
M.
I logged a ticket with MS over this, they say there is no problem. We sync on-prem AD to O365 with AADC. User profiles are fine in Exchange Online and Teams, and work with the People web-part.
However search doesn’t work, and 3rd party apps that hook into SharePoint User Profiles don’t work correctly… even though all the data is there in the profiles.
Microsoft support don’t want to know, and I have limited knowledge in SP administration. I’m hoping to find someone who has had the same problem and a fix.. not the fix MS support suggested of trying a new tenancy!! (I asked if they will be paying for the migration)
@Luke:
Sorry to hear about your support experience. That’s not good.
Without seeing the details, I’m not sure what the issue might be. “[S]earch doesn’t work” is pretty non-specific. What are the actual issues?
M.
We had support from Microsoft and figured out what the end url should be to enable the search to load correctly the first time. Use: /_layouts/15/sharepoint.aspx?v=%2Fsearch%2Fpeople
Please look at this, this adds the people tab. The perfect solution in my opinion! Enjoy!
I am having an issue with this returning to the site from which the user started? No matter what site/URL I use, when “Exit Search” is clicked, the user is taken to the root site for our organization, not back to the site they started at?
I actually cannot see anywhere at the moment… so i have to go back 2 steps for getting back on the original page.
@Teo:
I’m not sure if you need help or not…
M.
@Marc… Is there no way to create a search vertical for People Search and add it to a site collection in SPO? We have a nasty environment for global search that is slowly getting cleaned up, so our corporate portal is a hub (and not designated as a home site). We’d like the people search to be integrated, but looks like a link out to global scope is the only way?
@kevin:
So far, we can’t customize the default search results page very much. There are things like search connectors now, but no real way to change the verticals other than that today.
I’m a huge fan of the PnP Modern Search Web Parts for building more customized search experiences. If you haven’t used them, you should!
M.
I’m trying clearly doing something silly here.
If I do a simple paste from my org’s people search results page, I get:
https://domain.sharepoint.com/sites/Site_Name/_layouts/15/search.aspx/people
Which looks the same as you are suggesting, – but I don’t get the exit link at all.
Has something changed? Or am I misunderstanding something?
Thanks for your help.
@Chris:
I just tested adding
/_layouts/15/search.aspx/peopleat the end of/sites/sitenamein a tenant I had open, and it landed on the people search results. So it still seems to work, at least for me.M.