Administer Search Center for people search (Office SharePoint Server 2007)

Article
01/31/2017

Applies To: Office SharePoint Server 2007

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Topic Last Modified: 2017-01-24

The Search Center supplements the search box that is available at the top of the pages in the site collection to make people search available to users. After you import user profiles and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 has crawled and indexed them, you can perform searches on the user profile information through the Search Center.

In this article:

About Search Center
Search Center types
The default Search Center experience
Add Search Center to other site collections
Customize the Search Center experience
Task requirements

About Search Center

The Search Center provides a centralized and highly customizable user interface in which users can perform search queries. A Search Center consists of a search box for entering search queries, and a link to an Advanced Search page so that users can construct advanced search queries. By default, the search box is set to the All Sites scope so that users search across all content in the index. However, the People scope, used to search for people in the organization, is also available on a separate tab. Administrators can decide to add tabs and associate them with custom scopes that users can use to query different subsets of the content index. For information about custom scopes, see Plan the end-user search experience (Office SharePoint Server).

Search Center types

There are two versions of Search Center: Search Center with Tabs and Search Center (without tabs). When you create a site collection by using the default settings for a Basic installation, a Search Center with Tabs is automatically created. Search Center (without tabs) is typically added to site collections where the publishing features are not activated.

Several site collection templates are included with Search Center or Search Center with Tabs, as indicated in the following list. If the site collection template that was used to create the site collection is not in this list, you must create either a Search Center or a Search Center with Tabs to enable users to perform people searches through that site collection.

Collaboration Portal template
Search Center with Tabs template
Search Center template

Search Center with Tabs

Search Center with Tabs is the full version of Search Center, offering a fully customizable tab-based user interface.

The Search Center with Tabs template provides tab navigation, and can also be used for creating variation hierarchies.

Note

Variation hierarchies make it easy for administrators to keep content in sync between different sites provisioned in different languages. Because publishing sites can be tailored for different cultures, markets, and languages, variation settings enable site owners to create and maintain a number of different versions, or "variations," of publishing sites or pages. Search can therefore be customized to provide users a search experience in their preferred language; doing this, users will be able to submit queries or look for content in a familiar user interface (UI).

The main welcome page of the Search Center with Tabs features a simple search box in the center of the page. By default, the site includes two tabs: one (set to the All Sites scope) for general searches and another tab that is named People, for searches for information about people in the organization. You can add and customize tabs to focus on other search scopes, including other search scopes for people search.

Tip

You can use, as an example, the All Sites tab on a Search Center with Tabs site to search across all items in the content index. The People tab narrows a search to find only people. You can also search different collections of information separately by creating new Search tabs and configuring them to search those collections.

Before users can perform a people search in the Search Center with Tabs, you must first activate the SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure feature for the My Site site collection, and then activate the SharePoint Server Publishing feature for the sites to be used in the publishing process.

See Create a Search Center for people search (Office SharePoint Server 2007) for detailed information.

For information about variation hierarchies, see About variation labels (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=151246).

Search Center

The Search Center (without tabs) does not provide tab navigation and does not have the SharePoint Server Publishing and SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure features active. Therefore, by using the Search Center (without tabs) site template, you can very quickly add a Search Center site to a site collection to deliver the most basic search experience. The main welcome page features a simple search box in the center of the page.

The default Search Center experience

Several of the out-of-the-box site collection templates in Office SharePoint Server 2007 automatically create a Search Center with Tabs experience when the template is used:

The Search Center with Tabs is included by default in the site collection when you provision a portal using the Collaboration Portal template.
If you provision a portal by using the Search Center with Tabs template, a site collection is created that contains only a Search Center with Tabs.

By default, Search Center with Tabs contains a People tab for people search. The People tab can be customized to return people search results from a specific search scope. Or, the default People tab for people search can be kept unchanged and a new tab can be created and customized to return people search results from a specific search scope.

Add Search Center to other site collections

As previously described, there are two Search Center experiences, Search Center and Search Center with Tabs. The ability to use either Search Center to add people search to a site collection depends on whether the Office SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure feature is active for the site collection. Certain site collection templates by default activate the Office SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure feature, whereas other templates do not. Depending on the business needs for the site collection, you can also manually activate or deactivate the Office SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure feature for the site collection.

To determine which kind of Search Center can be used in the site collection, you must first determine whether the Office SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure feature is activated in the site collection. To determine whether the Office SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure feature is active in the site collection, do the following:

Important

You must be a site collection administrator on the site collection that contains the Search Center, or on the site collection where the Search Center is to be created, to complete this task.

Open the top-level site of the site collection where you want to create the Search Center.
Click Site Actions, and then click Site Settings. If an option for Modify All Site Settings appears, click it.
On the Site Settings page, in the Site Collection Administration section, click Site Collection Features.
On the Site Collection Features page, in the Name column, locate the feature named Office SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure.
Look in the Status column. If the status is set to Active, the Publishing Infrastructure feature is activated for the site collection. If the status is not set to Active, the Publishing Infrastructure feature is not activated for the site collection.

After you have determined whether the Office SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure feature is activated or not, use the following information to decide how you want to make people search available through Search Center.

Customize the Search Center experience

You can tailor Search Centers individually to return specific subsets of data and to enable users to find people by name, or by their user profile values. Several Web Parts display the search results on the search results page. One of the Web Parts, the Search Core Results Web Part, has various properties that you can configure to customize the Web Part.

You have several options available to customize people search in the site collection:

If the Office SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure feature is active in the site collection, you can do the following:
- Create a new Search Center with Tabs
- In an existing Search Center with Tabs, customize the People tab to use a specific search scope for people search.
- In an existing Search Center with Tabs, add a new tab and customize it to use a specific search scope for people search.
- You can customize Search Center with Tabs to change the order in which the tabs appear in the Search Center with Tabs. This enables you to control which tab opens as the default tab to users when they open the Search Center with Tabs. You can do this, for example, if you created a new tab and customized it to use a specific search scope for people search.
- You can create a new Search Center (without tabs) and customize it to use a specific search scope for people search.
If the Office SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure feature is not active in the site collection, to make people search available to users, you can create a new Search Center (without tabs) and customize it to use a specific search scope for people search.

For more information about how to customize Search Centers, see Customizing the Enterprise Search Center.

Task requirements

The following is required to perform the procedures for this task:

You must be a site collection administrator on the site collection that contains the Search Center, or on the site collection where the Search Center is to be created, to complete this task.

To manage Search Center for people search, you perform one or more of the following procedures as needed:

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