Skills Search with SharePoint 2010

One of the more impressive integrations between Lync Server 2010 and SharePoint 2010 is the capability to search skills, expertise, and organizational information from a SharePoint 2010 My Site. If users populate these fields in their My Site, Lync users will be able to search for users based on these fields. Imaging being able to search for a contact with “powershell skills” and getting back a list of corporate contacts who have flagged themselves are experts in PowerShell. No longer do users have to already know who to contact for specific questions. Users can build a dynamic searchable database of skills and organizational information that make it infinitely easier for users to find the right people with whom to collaborate.

To enable skills search, users must have SharePoint 2010 (or 2007) with maintained My Sites. SharePoint search center URL is provisioned through in-band settings and SharePoint must be published to the Internet. It also requires a full version of SharePoint; Windows SharePoint Services is not compatible with skills search.

First, a client policy must be configured and applied to configure the Lync clients to point to the correct SharePoint URLs. The policy sets both SPSearchInternalURL and SPSearchExternalURL.

Through the Lync Server Management Shell, issue the following two commands:

Set-CSClientPolicy –SPSearchInternalURL http://<server>/_vti_bin/search.asmx
Set-CSClientPolicy –SPSearchExternalURL http://<server>/_vti_bin/search.asmx

To also display the Search Center URL at the bottom of the search results, run the following two commands from the Lync Server Management Shell:

Set-CSClientPolicy –SPSearchCenterInternalURL
http://<server>/SearchCenter/Pages/PeopleResults.aspx
Set-CSClientPolicy –SPSearchCenterExternalURL
http://<server>/SearchCenter/Pages/PeopleResults.aspx

After the commandlets run, restart the Lync client for the policy to take effect. There are two ways to tell whether it is applied. When performing a search, there are two options: Name and Skill (see Figure 20.20).

Figure 20.20 Searching by Name or Skill

The other way to tell whether is applied is to Control-right-click the Lync icon in the taskbar and select the Configuration Information table. There are two new entries, as shown in Figure 20.21.

Figure 20.21 Viewing the Configuration Information

• Skill Search URL

• SharePoint Search Center URL

If results are found in this manner, there will be an option to View results in SharePoint at the bottom of the client. This links to the full SharePoint interface to display more detailed information about the results.