Following the previous post on search, this shows how to simply and quickly show a single users profile details on a page. Note, that this intended for MOSS (where we have the profile database) but could be re-worked for WSS to show details from the user list.

On our page, we need to add the People Search Core Results Part

Once added, open the web part properties so we can configure the part. We need to make several changes....

a) Under the Results Display / View group, set the Results Default View to Relveance and Results per page to 1

b) Under the Results Query Options group, change the Cross Web Part Query ID to Query 2 (see also note below)

c) Under the Miscellanous group, uncheck all the options except  Show Search Results

d) Finally, in the Fixed Keyword Query option, enter the query required (e.g. LastName:Piper)

Save the changes.

The final result will be basic details from the profile databse about our user

If the appearance needs to be changed, then you can edit the XSLT (another future post I think!) to suit.

Note - you may need more than one profile - in this case, the Cross Web Part Query ID needs to unique for each part on the page.

If you have more than 3 user profiles to display, then consider using different queries to get multiple results. For example, to show all users who have the property Department:Sales to show all sales members. If doing this, the number of search results should be increased from 1!

The recent platform update to WSS and MOSS has bought into play Search Server 2008. Whilst very powerful on it's own. it allows us now to provide roll up funcitonality inside WSS or MOSS.

Previously, roll ups were undertaken using Content Query Web Part, Third Party solutions like our friends at Bamboo or other custom components. For those who don't know what we mean by roll up, it is to take a central view on all content of certain type / property, e.g. all announcements from all webs in all site collections. The diagram below summarises...

Now I was going to type a long blog on how we did it using Search, but to save my fingers (or at least for the moment) take a look at DevCow

Of course, the beauty of the latest infrastructure update is that we now can roll up on the WSS platform.

Search is very powerful, not just for user defined results, but also for other tasks like that above. Hopefully, the next blog post will be a single persons profile, or displaying Business Data Catalog info

UPDATE - October

Something I forgot to mention when I posted the article was that using the normal Search Results web parts, there is a limit on how many items you can display at once without pagination