Deploying People Search - SharePoint 2013

Now that we have configured the Search Service Application and created the search center next up is deploying people search. Here is how it goes.

Step 01 - Grant Access for an account to crawl the profile store

Navigate to Manage Service Applications in the Application Management. Click to highlight the Search Service Application. Click on the “Administrators” in the ribbon. When the dialog box pops up, add the intended user account.  Make sure the user has permissions to Retrieve People Data for Search Crawlers. Click "OK" when done.

                                                                                                                                                           
                                                               
Step 02 - Create crawl rule

Navigate to create a new crawl rule (Search service application > click Crawl Rule > New Crawl Rule).

The quick launch in the search service application page contains the link.

[search service application page quick launch]

[Manage Crawl Rules page]

Provide the path to the start address of user profile service application. The format would be sps3://<hostname> where host name is the URL for the web application in which the My Sites site collection is deployed.

Select “Include all items in this path”

In the authentication section you can either keep the default content access account or provide the one you gave administration permission. This basically depends on your requirement. In order to give authentication for the user which you prefer, select "Specify a different content access account"  and provide account name and password.

Note that the "Do not allow basic authentication check box is selected by default". This allows user credentials to be encrypted before sending, which is the preferred approach unless you are using SSL to encrypt traffic.

                                                                                                                                                                                                  
Step 03 – Remove the profile store URL from the default content source
Navigate to Manage Content Source page. Click on the default content source "Local SharePoint site" which was created by default.

In the Start address list, remove the URL for the profile store ( sps3://<hostname> ) and click "OK".

Step 04 – Create a content source to crawl the profile store

In the "Manage Content Sources" page click "New Content Source"

• Type crawl name
• Provide Start address in the format sps3://<hostname>
• Select "Crawl everything under the hostname for each start address"
• You can choose between the continuous and incremental crawl depending on your business requirement.
•  If you are specifying the incremental crawl, setup a schedule for it.
• Set the content source priority.
• Click "OK"

Now the configuration is done ! User profile crawl is independent of the local sharepoint site crawl.

Make sure the user profile synchronization is setup (this is discussed in an earlier post.)

As for the first time, you can click on the drop down arrow of the newly create Profile Store content source, and start a full crawl.

Once the crawl is done you can go to the search center and try out the people search.