Configuring People Search in SharePoint 2010

SharePoint 2010 provides Enterprise Search Center template to create a separate site collection for searching. Here I’m going to discuss about how to configure People search.

Creating Search Center site collection: 

1.       In Central Administration go to Application Management ant click Create site collections. 

2.       In the Template Selection section select Enterprise Search Center under Enterprise tab.

3.       Click Ok to complete creating search center.

Search center site collection provides All sites and People search scopes to search site contents and people separately.

Next we need to configure Search Service Application to enable searching, All sites and People separately. A content source is required for the searching. To create content source follow the following steps. 

1.       Go to Manage Service Applications under Application Management. 

2.       Click on Search Service Application 

3.       Under Crawling section click Content Sources. 

4.       By default there is a content source named Local SharePoint sites. 

5.       Click on Local SharePoint sites to go to Edit Content Source page. 

6.       In Start Addresses remove the address of Search Center. Ex: search center web application address is http://bll-shpdev-01:7879. This address should be removed from Local SharePoint Sites content source. 

7.       Go back to Content sources page and click New Content Source. 

8.       Provide a name for content source. Ex: My Site Search. 

9.       Under start address, type search center address we created above as follows.

10.   Click ok to complete creating content source.

Next needed to start the crawling for the content source.

Click on the arrow besides the My Site Search and select Start Full Crawl. Wait till status of the My Site Search become Idle.

 

Search Service Application configuration is done. Now go to Search Center site collection and start searching people. Click on People tab and search for people.