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/people

The [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?