I have created a user “Robert Dylan” and never used name “Bob”, but search understands that I’m looking for Robert Dylan when I’m searching for Bob or Bob Dylan or Bobby.
Important thing – result is shown under “All” and “People” verticals.
I know Microsoft claimed m365 search is backed by Turing technology – it understands you, answers your question but not just blindly display keyword occurences (announcement at Ignite Spring, more on Ignite Fall 2021)… So is that it?
But the same trick did not work with Dick for Richard or (of course) Syd for Roger Barrett:
Nickname (or alias or moniker or hypocorism etc.) is some another name – usually shorter than original name and widely used in maybe all countries in the world. E.g. Bob is a nickname for Robert in the US and GB, Checo is the other name for Sergio in Mexico. There might be personal names also – e.g. Bapu (father) is an word that is usually associated with Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, also known as the Mahatma Gandhi. More examples: David “Noodles” Aaronson, Roger Keith “Syd” Barrett etc.
In Microsoft 365 we want to search for a person’s name we know – and in many cases it’s a nickname – e.g. Beth (Bethany) or Alex (Alexander). Can m365 search do that?
It takes a few steps to implement search by nickname:
create a custom property under SharePoint Online User Profiles service
fill this property with values
configure Search Schema – map crawled property to managed property
Step-by-Step
Create a custom property under SharePoint Online User Profiles service
Ensure you have a SharePoint Administrator role activated
Navigate to SharePoint Admin Center – more features – User Profiles – Manage user properties – New Property
Configure custom property according to your needs, – ensure “Policy Settings” “Default Privacy Setting:” Everyone is selected – ensure “Search Settings” “Indexed” is selected
Fill SharePoint Online User Profile Properties with values
That would be a custom solution – e.g. manual work from SPO Admin Center GUI or PowerShell script ( e.g. with some dictionary). This is required for search to pick it up, crawl the property and create crawled property – so you could proceed with search schema mapping.
Configure Search Schema – map crawled property to managed property
For the nickname to be generally available in full-text-search – i.e. user simply enter value in a search bar and gets results – here are the steps:
Ensure you have a SharePoint Administrator role activated
Navigate to SharePoint Admin Center – More features – Search – Manage Search Schema
Select Crawled Properties and ensure search picked up your custom property and crawled it – check your crawled property name under Category: People.
Under Managed Properties – create a new managed property
select “Searchable”
under Advanced searchable settings – select Full-text index: PeopleIdx
Published: May 1, 2022 Update from Mar 5, 2023: Microsoft confirmed this as valid solution. Update from May 20, 2024: still true Update from June 12, 2024: I have just found “ABP in Exchange Online“… Looking into it…
Scenario
You want specific users do not appear in Microsoft 365 SharePoint, Teams or Outlook search results. For instance, when user left company and the account is not deleted, but just disabled in Entra Id (Azure AD), so account is present and searchable. Or there are two accounts of the same person – main one and a secondary one – so you want secondary account is removed from org structure and search. Etc.
Solution
Set “ShowInAddressList” Azure AD User object property to false. It’s done using Az module, e.g. with PowerShell:
In many cases we do not need some accounts to appear in Microsoft 365 Search. Examples are:
a) secondary or admin accounts e.g. a person have several roles and several accounts under the same name, e.g. regular user: John Smith John.Smith@contoso.com administrative account: John Smith John.Smith.Admin@contoso.com b) role, shared or service accounts: marketing@contoso.com c) non-mail-enabled objects d) disabled accounts
Getting multiple search results for the same person might confuse users and even lead to miscommunication and broken processes.
There is a good article by Tania Menice (Microsoft): Exclude Users From Delve and SharePoint Online People Search with the latest updates explaining how it is done for classic search and stating that currently it is not possible for modern search, but Microsoft is working on it.
In short, the article says:
Set the profiles AD property msExchHideFromAddressLists to True or Yes,
Sync/wait, so finally SharePoint UPA service SPS-HideFromAddressLists property will be updated (as it is mapped to msExchHideFromAddressLists AD property)
Under SharePoint classic search – update query to: {searchboxquery} -“SPS-HideFromAddressLists”:1
It works perfect for classic search. The problem is it does not work as expected in modern Microsoft Search.
“People” vertical is not customizable so far. So we cannot change query in Microsoft 365 search to do the same trick. But… it seems like Microsoft is working on it so finally it should be done by some kind of ootb config.
Here is how different services or search entry points respect SPS-HideFromAddressLists SharePoint UPA property:
So only “People” vertical in Microsoft search does not respect SPS-HideFromAddressLists (msExchHideFromAddressLists).
(Modern) Microsoft 365 Search
What about cloud-based accounts (not synchronized from local AD)?
There is a configuration setting “Show in global address list” that does the same job. It’s under Microsoft 365 admin center -> Active Users -> User – Edit -> Mail -> Show in global address list:
And another configuration settings “Hide from global address list (GAL)” under Exchange Admin Center:
I tested behavior for different kind of accounts and here are results:
User Account
#1
#2
#3
#4
#5
Enabled
Yes
No
Yes
Yes
Yes
Licensed (E5)
No
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
m365 Admin Center: Show in Global Address List
n/a
No
No
Yes
No
Exchange Admin Center: Hide from global address list (GAL)
n/a
Yes
Yes
No
Yes
ShowInAddressList Entra Id property value
null
null
null
null
False
SPO UPA ‘SPS-HideFromAddressLists‘ value
False
False
False
False
True
Outlook Address List “All Users”
Shown
Office.com Search: Vertical “All”
Shown
Office.com Search: Vertical “People”
Shown
Shown
Shown
Shown
Bing Work Search: All/People verticals
Shown
Shown
Teams Search: “All” Vertical
Shown
Shown
Teams Search: “People” vertical
Shown
Shown
Shown
Shown
Microsoft 365 Profile card – Organization
Shown
Shown
Teams Profile card – Organization
Shown
Shown
Shown
Shown
Teams People Picker
Shown
Shown
Shown
Shown
SharePoint People Picker
Shown
Outlook People Picker:
Shown
* – some users can see changes after hours, for some it takes days
It seems confusing we have 4 properties responsible for the same:
“Show in Global Address List” under m365 Admin Center
“Hide from global address list (GAL)” under Exchange Admin Center
“ShowInAddressList” Azure AD User object property
“SPS-HideFromAddressLists” SharePoint User Profile property
Are these properties related to each other?
Let’s test it:
Action-Consequences (immediate reaction – minutes if not other mentioned)
“Show in Global Address List” under m365 Admin Center
“Hide from global address list (GAL)” under Exchange Admin Center
ShowInAddressList Azure AD User object property
SPS-HideFromAddressLists SharePoint User Profile property
New user created, license assigned
Yes
Off
null
False
Uncheck “Show in my organization address list” under Microsoft 365 admin center
No
On
after one minute: null after 24 hours: null
after one minute: False after 24 hours: False
Set “ShowInAddressList” Azure AD User object property to “True”
Yes
Off
True
False
Set “ShowInAddressList” Azure AD User object property to “False”
“Show in Global Address List” under m365 Admin Center and “Hide from global address list (GAL)” under Exchange Admin Center – same switch, i.e. if you change one – another is updated automatically Neither of them affect “ShowInAddressList” Azure AD User object property or “SPS-HideFromAddressLists” SharePoint User Profile property
“SPS-HideFromAddressLists” SharePoint User Profile property is not changeable. If you try to change the property value you get an error message: “Set-PnPUserProfileProperty : Property Not Editable: This property can not be modified.“
“ShowInAddressList” Azure AD User object property is editable and synchronized to “Show in Global Address List” under m365 Admin Center and “Hide from global address list (GAL)” under Exchange Admin Center, and also with “SPS-HideFromAddressLists” SharePoint User Profile property (takes minutes), but then search crawler must pick this change up (takes hours) to hide/show the user (this was tested and validated for cloud-born accounts only)
here Microsoft says: regarding showInAddressList – Do not use in Microsoft Graph. Manage this property through the Microsoft 365 admin center instead. Represents whether the user should be included in the Outlook global address list. See Known issue.
Known issue (Microsoft): showInAddressList property is out of sync with Microsoft Exchange. When querying users through Microsoft Graph, the showInAddressList property may not indicate the same status shown in Microsoft Exchange. We recommend you manage this functionality directly with Microsoft Exchange through the Microsoft 365 admin center and not to use this property in Microsoft Graph.
Disclaimer
I used and tested all cloud-born accounts only. I do not have on-prem AD, so If your users are synchronized from local AD – do your own research – is this property synced from some local AD property, and if so – set AD property instead.
Bottom line
Setting “ShowInAddressList” Azure AD User object property to “false” is the most effective way to hide user account from search, but it could be changed only with PowerShell:
Office graph = codename for collective set of services and insights we generate on top of the infrastructure that fast office graph group developed = social Intel concepts (SharePoint home, Delve, OneDrive Discoverview) are derivatives of Office graph
Microsoft Search API provides one unified search endpoint that you can use to query data in the Microsoft cloud – messages and events in Outlook mailboxes, and files on OneDrive and SharePoint – that Microsoft Search already indexes.
Turing technology – understands you, answers your question e.g. hover over doc -> doc summary (based on “deep speed” AI model) announcement at Ignite Spring, more on Ignite Fall 2021
Modern Search: MS nailed the fundamentals, now start bringing it everywhere – to Teams first, then SharePoint (said Nov 2020).
Modern Search Customizations – we’ll take the best from Classic SharePoint Search, a lot will retire – investing in more flexibility
Bill Baer: “People use search in a different ways 1) you have organisations who have a well-established intranet built around set of governance controls, a very clean architecture and they want to build a search into that intranet scenario; that’s why a lot of SharePoint capabilities are going to come along with Microsoft search for that particular endpoint 2) then you have other people who live their day in teams“
Updates
Shared search engine results page (developed once – transitioned everywhere) Ctrl-F to search through teams (chats?) (contextual search) Natural language search (starting from Outlook) Image search (before eoy), +
Metadata content type search Syntex customers will be able to use content type to search in the advanced search flyout in document libraries that contain content types beyond the default types. Syntex only.
Conversations: teams chats, outlook groups conversations, yammer conversation can be found under Conversations vertical in Bing search. Later – in Office.com and SharePoint landing page. E-mail messages are added to Conversations vertical in Bing search
Bookmarks (new promoted results), acronyms, Q&A – all under “Answers”
BookmarksTargeting – for the specific audience based on device/OS, Country/Region, security groups…
SharePoint Search Admin Center -> will be migrated from SharePoint admin center to to Microsoft Search Admin Center transitioning (Search and Intelligence Admin Center) – long-running project custom dictionaries, spelling suggestions – will retire, (move to a graph-driven speller)
+ Viva Topics – based search capabilities
Create Topic Answers with Microsoft Viva Topics to bring together people, content, and information (including synonyms and acronyms)
Knowledge answers provide a direct answer to questions authoritative information in an organization across SharePoint and OneDrive content
Files/Calendars/Links answers
Graph Connectors Graph Connectors are generally available (ADLS – Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, Azure DevOps, Azure SQL and Microsoft SQL Server, Enterprise websites, MediaWiki, File share, Oracle SQL, Salesforce, Jira, Confluence, ServiceNow + 100+ from partners; New connectors coming to Microsoft Search: Jira Graph connector, Confluence Graph connector).
Graph Connector allows to connect external source of information to Microsoft 365 and makes that data available across all m365 apps and services so you can find what you need wherever you’re working, whether in one of your favorite productivity apps or one of the many Microsoft 365 services such as SharePoint or Office.com
Graph Connectors roadmap:
Actionable experiences Search results on select Graph connectors will soon support actions that will allow users to interact with the result and perform changes to the Connector content within the Search application.
Results clusters The results shown in a result cluster are grouped together based on the search vertical configuration.
Profile Query variables Define any attribute from the user’s Profile, as a query variable and it would be resolved during query evaluation (This feature is currently in preview)
Profile enrichment with Graph connectors …you will soon be able to enrich Microsoft 365 profile properties like Job title, Phone numbers, Skills etc. with data from HRMS systems using graph connectors. …then surface this rich profile information on people experiences like profile cards.
Search Federation federation capabilities will allow enterprises build and integrate their custom LOB search experiences, customized search providers, into the overall Microsoft Search. With federated search, you can make information from systems where the data cannot leave the systems boundaries available to search across in Microsoft 365 productivity apps and services, without indexing its data with Microsoft Search.
Standalone Search – AAD identity – Graph connector – Ingest your data – use Search = in Windows 10, Office.com ( e.g. for those who have their data in other productivity suite, have no intent to use m365, but want to search)
your organization maintain custom active directory attributes – e.g. Campus Name, Employee Id, Hiring Category etc.
your organization use Microsoft 365 for collaboration
users want to search for custom properties like “Employee id” or refine search by custom properties like Campus Name
What is Microsoft saying
“The following Azure AD user attributes are synced to the UPA.” : (Azure AD attributes) – UserPrincipalName, DisplayName, GivenName, sn, telephoneNumber, proxyAddresses, PhysicalDeliveryOfficeName, Title, Department, WWWHomePage, PreferredLanguage, msExchHideFromAddressList, Manager Respective User profile property display names: Account Name, User Name, User Principal Name, Name, FirstName, LastName, Work phone, Work Email, SIP Address, Office, Title, Job Title, Department, Public site redirect, Language Preferences, SPS-HideFromAddressLists, Manager (here)
Q: “Why isn’t it possible to map additional properties for UPA synchronization to sync from Azure AD to the User Profile Application?” A: “UPA synchronization is limited to a preconfigured set of properties to guarantee consistent performance across the service.” (here)
“You can make the following attributes from Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) visible on users’ profile cards. These attributes are not case-sensitive: UserPrincipalName, Fax, StreetAddress, PostalCode, StateOrProvince, Alias” (here)
“You can add any of the 15 Azure AD custom extension attributes to users’ profile cards… Custom properties are not searchable and can’t be used to search for people across Microsoft apps and services.” (here)
Solution
It takes a few steps to solve the problem:
create a custom property under SharePoint Online User Profiles service
synchronize AD/AAD attribute with SPO User Profile custom property
configure Search Schema – map crawled property to managed property
Detailed:
Create a custom property under SharePoint Online User Profiles service
Ensure you have a SharePoint Administrator role activated
Navigate to SharePoint Admin Center – more features – User Profiles – Manage user properties – New Property
Configure custom property according to your needs, – ensure “Policy Settings” “Default Privacy Setting:” Everyone is selected – ensure “Search Settings” “Indexed” is selected
Hint: you can fill this property for some user profiles – for search to pick it up and crawl the property – so you could configure search schema mapping before synchronizing property from Active Directory
Synchronize Active Directory attribute to SharePoint Online User Profile
That would be a custom solution – e.g. scheduled PowerShell script. You can host this script in Azure Functions if you sync Azure AD attributes to SPO or use on-prem machine if you need access to local AD.
PowerShell Script example (TBP)
Configure Search Schema – map crawled property to managed property
Ensure you have a SharePoint Administrator role activated
Navigate to SharePoint Admin Center – More features – Search – Manage Search Schema
Select Crawled Properties and ensure search picked up your custom property and crawled it – you should see your property name under Category: People.
Full-text search and/or query-based search
If you want your custom property is generally available in full-text-search – i.e. user simply enter value in a search bar and gets results – typical scenario might be an employee id – here are the steps (under Search Schema)
create a new managed property
for Full-text search
select Searchable
under Advanced searchable settings – select Full-text index: PeopleIdx
for Query-based search – select Queryable and Retrievable
map this managed property to crawled property
Free-text search: you just enter what you search for into search bar and click search.
Query-based search allows you to use KQL – e.g. you are searching for keyword “PowerShell” with full-text search, but want only people with PowerShell skills located in a specific building or campus – search query might look like “PowerShell campus:Stanford”
Refine search with custom property
If you want to be able to refine your search with custom property – in this case the steps are (under Search Schema):
under Managed Properties – select a refinable string property that is not taken (not mapped) – e.g. RefinableSting53
setup alias – so you could refer to this RefinableSting53 by meaningful name
The following solution is for Classic Search only.
What I did is:
User profile services -> Manage User properties: create custom property like “HideFromPeopleSearch”, boolean, do not allow users to edit value, Indexed
Client-side PowerShell script using PnP library:
Connect-PnPOnline -Url https://domain-admin.sharepoint.com
…
$nonPeople = Get-ADUser -filter … # based on what’s in your AD and how you separate people and non-people accounts
foreach($account in $nonPeople) {
Set-PnPUserProfileProperty -Property ‘HideFromPeopleSearch’ -Value ‘True’ -Account $account.UserPrincipalName
}
SearchCenter -> Site Settings -> Search Schema: use any pre-created RefinableString managed property (e.g. RefinableString33), add mapping to crawled property people:HideFromPeopleSearch,
SearchCenter -> Site Settings -> Search Query rules: Local People Results, new Query rule, change ranked results by changing query, {searchTerms} -RefinableString33=True
