Wednesday 1:40 PM - 2:50 PM · Room S104b

Building a Rich People Search with OOTB and Open Source Components

Peter Carson

President

Whenever we poll an organization for the top features for their Intranet, People Search that actually works is always in the top three. You'd think this would have been long solved, but it's often still a challenge for many organizations.

There are a number of reasons for this:

• People data is often spread in many different places and systems in an organization, and there is no single version of the truth
• As a result, Azure AD, which is the core of identity in Microsoft 365, is either not well populated or just plain wrong
• People search and people cards in Microsoft 365 has gotten tremendously better, but it's still not all the way there

With so much of an organization's IP and knowledge actually in the heads of the people, finding a person or expert is key to success for the organization as a whole.

In this session we'll go over a series of steps any organization can take to get a handle on their people in Microsoft 365, and provide a simple and rich experience for finding the right person at the right time.

• Review of Azure AD identities and how they are managed
  • Synced users from on-premises AD with Azure AD Connect
  • Cloud only identities
  • What IT manages, and what users or the business can self-manage
• Other sources of truth, and how they can be synced to Azure AD
  • HRIS, payroll
  • Customizing and extending Azure AD with additional attributes specific to the organization
  • Easily deploying and configuring an open-source, rich people search web part that can be used organization wide or within departments or business units
    • https://github.com/YannickRe/spfx-msgraph-peoplesearch
  • Building fully-customized person pages and self-managed profile pages

We'll also share real-world examples of this in use for a municipal police force, large charity, and post-secondary college.