Tag Archives: Search

Searchable Custom User Profile Property in Microsoft 365

Scenario

Consider the following:

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
map this RefinableSting to crawled property

Microsoft Search country-targeted bookmarks: new “Use Azure AD locations” flag

Use Azure AD locations

“Use Azure AD locations” flag is a straight-forward configuration settings. It says: “This bookmark will only appear for users with Azure AD locations that match selected countries or regions. If cleared, the user’s IP address will be used to determine location. This checkbox can be altered from both Country or region setting and Targeted variations setting.”

I have tested this new “Use Azure AD locations” flag – it works. Once you configure user’s country in AAD and country-targeted bookmarks – all works good. Bookmarks appear for the user.

What if we do not “Use Azure AD locations” flag

to be provided

What was before “Use Azure AD locations” flag

What was before Microsoft implemented this “Use Azure AD locations” option? How did Microsoft understand “this user is from that country”. What was the criteria to correlate User <-> Country? License assigned country? Windows locale? Browser settings? Azure AD properties?

How does Microsoft define “this user is from that country”. What are the criteria to correlate User <-> Country? Physical IP address? License assigned country? Locale? Browser settings? Azure AD properties?

It turned out, the way it was designed previously:
– configure Microsoft 365 integration with Bing
– in Bing -> Settings : select Country/Region
– search from Bing
that was the only way to make it work! So yes, do not leave “Use Azure AD locations” option unchecked. Microsoft confirmed it was poor design.

Always “Use Azure AD locations” flag.

Resources:

Office 365 Search scopes

1 Reply

Search is everywhere in Microsoft 365. You can search from SharePoint, Teams, Delve, Yammer etc.

But! You cannot search for anything from everywhere!

Search for your Teams chat messages works only in Teams.
But from Teams you cannot search for regular (non-group) sites and public teams sites
All descriptions are totally out of search (e.g. site description, library/list description – including Yammer groups, Teams and regular sites).
Public Team Sites content is not searchable from Teams and Yammer

So, what are the scopes of each search entry point in Office 365 and is there an entry point you can search for everything?

Search scopes	SharePoint Search center	SharePoint home Office portal Office desktop app Delve	Teams	Bing
SharePoint content	Yes	Yes		Yes
Teams content	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Teams chats		(*1)	Yes	Yes
Yammer content	Yes	Yes		Yes
Yammer chat		(*1)		Yes
User profiles	Yes	Yes
Email

(*1) Microsoft announced they are working on bringing conversations (both Teams chats and Yammer) to SharePoint landing page first, then to Office home page.

Detailed:

	Scope	Out of Scope
SharePoint Search Center	– all sites content (Teams, Yammer, regular), – user profiles – OneDrive	Teams chat Yammer chat
SharePoint Landing Page	same as SharePoint Search center but Teams chats and Yammer Conversations are coming	same as SharePoint Search Center
Office.com	same as SharePoint (Teams chats and Yammer Conversations are coming after SharePoint)	same as SharePoint
Delve
Teams	Teams content Teams chat	OneDrive Yammer User Profiles regular SharePoint sites
Bing	Everything*	* except people profiles content (e.g. about me)

Seems like the only tool you can search for EVERYTHING with is Microsoft Bing:

Update: there are rumors that Microsoft is decommissioning work search in Bing… Pity… But something tells me that decomm is due to lack of usage/popularity, so Microsoft will introduce something similar…

After Microsoft add Teams chats and Yammer conversations to SharePoint landing page search scope (then to Office home page) – it’ll be the best place to search from for everything.

More on Microsoft Search vs SharePoint Search and Microsoft Search RoadMap

Microsoft Office 365 Search: Find what you need with Microsoft Search in Bing

It is possible customize Modern Microsoft Search pages with PnP Modern Search

How to find a public team in Microsoft Teams not knowing exact name

Quick and simple answer: use SharePoint Search center or Microsoft Search, (or Bing if it is integrated).

Detailed explanation on how to find a public Team

In Microsoft Office 365, under MS Teams, there are 3 types of teams:

Private team
Public team
Org-wide team

Private team: you can only join the team if you are invited or know the team code.
SharePoint site behind the private team is shared only to members – not for everyone. You cannot see team name or description or content until you are team member (details). You are not able to search for the team name or content.

Public team: you can join the public team if you wish. The site behind the public team is shared with everyone except external users, so you can see public team name and description, but from MS Teams (desktop or web application) you cannot see public team content until you are team member.

Org-wide team: you are joined the team automatically (details)

From Teams – you can click on “Join or create a team” and you should be able to see some public teams (but not all):

See how Microsoft describes it – Find and Join a team

There is a “Search teams” box at the top right,
so what if you are looking for a specific public team (not in the list) …

Scenario 1

You know exact team name or at least some first letters.
Solution: You are lucky. Just start typing team name in search bar at top right and hit “enter”- you will see shortened list of public teams matching your search criteria:

NB: do not use wildcards, it will not work:

NB: do not use top search bar, it will not work:

Scenario 2

You want to join a public team, but you do not know exact team name.
You know (or guess) something about the team, like

part of the team name
part of the team description
some keywords from team content files

Unfortunately, in this case both great Microsoft technologies – Search and Team – fail. You will not be able to find a public team:

What Microsoft says

Actually Microsoft does not have a solution and just did not provide workaround:
here is the concern “Search for a public team WITHOUT providing the exact name” with no answer from Microsoft.

Solution

Just use SharePoint search of Bing Search or Office.com – any other plain search wherever you can.
SharePoint site is created once a team is created to store actual content. If the team is public – SharePoint site behind will be accessible for everyone.

For public teams – SharePoint site has “Everyone except external users” by default in “Members” group:

which means literally “Everyone except external users” has access to the site with “Edit” permissions.

SharePoint search is security-trimmed, i.e. you will see the site content in search results only if you do have access to the site. So just go to the SharePoint landing page or SharePoint search center of Office.com and search for what you know or guess about the team:

You can use all the power of SharePoint search (wildcards, refiners, keyword query language KQL etc)

Once you found something – you can go to the SharePoint site:

Now from the site – look at the site name and hover the mouse over the site name – you’ll see pop-up window.
Now you know exact team name – and you can search for the team under Teams,
or, if you are so lucky you see “Join” button – just join the team.click site title or hove over the site title:

One moment – you cannot see team’s chat messages in SharePoint, as chats are kept in Azure. But you can search for chat content after you joint the team.

Somehow both – SharePoint Search and Teams Search are not working against site/team description. Hopefully this bug will be addressed.

You can also search for site Url in teams.
When you create a team – Office 365 generates a short team name (removes spaces and adds numbers if the team name is not unique; e.g. if the team name “Test” you might have “test381” as a short name, but if the team name is “This Is My Unique Team” – short name might be “ThisIsMyUniqueTeam”).
After you can change team name and/or SharePoint site name.
Team search under MS teams work for both names – short name initially assigned (kept as site specific Url) and new team name. But only starting with the beginning of the string.

Video tutorial

What is the correct way of searching for a Public Team in Microsoft Teams

p.s. Thanks to “Birds of Kazakhstan” for pictures

btw, there is a good video tutorial on how to find a public team in Office 365 using full-text search

SPO: Description, Owner fields are not searchable

Scenario:

You have a list (or a document library) in SharePoint Online.
You can search through the list but some fields (or document properties) like “Description”, “Subject”, “Author”, “Owner”, “AssignedTo”, “Created”, “CreatedBy” are not searchable.

Cause:

Crawled properties are mapped to non-searchable managed properties. So this is by design. Check Microsoft’s “Overview of crawled and managed properties in SharePoint Server” (we do not have this document for SharePoint Online, so we have to rely on this doc; though you can go to your Search schema in SPO to verify). You see some pre-created managed properties do not have “Searchable” option enabled.

Solution:

(See below for details, as this is still not finished:)

Prove:

I have created a new SPO site test78, a new list Test11 and created (not added from existing) a custom field “Description” to the list:

I also created “Description2” column the same way. No data is added to the list so far.

Search schema looks like:

for Description managed property:

mapping:

Notice that “Description” managed property is not searchable and “ows_Description” crawled property is mapped to “Description” managed property.

Searching for “ows_Description” crawled property gives me:

and that’s OK, as we have no data in the list so “ows_Description2” crawled property does not exist.

Now let me add some data to the list:

and wait a few minutes while continues crawl grabs data.

You can see:

Title and Description2 are searchable, but we are not able to search through “Description” field content.

Explanation

Actually this is by design.
Microsoft: “The index only includes content and metadata from the managed properties”.
(Maybe Microsoft tries to protect their resources from overloading or maybe they protect us from irrelevant results, but including entire document content in full-text search and at the same time not including properties like Document Subject – this does not make sense to me). So the sad fact is list column “Description” is mapped to non-searchable managed property by default.

“Searchable” means: “…The content of this managed property is included in the full-text index.” I.e. if the property is not searchable – “The content of this managed property is not included in the full-text index.” => that’s by design.

But – the good news – the property is Queryable!
Queryable “Enables querying against the specific managed property”.

E.e. “Description:Descr1*” query should work. And it works:

“Description2:Descr*” query should not work as we did not map Description2 property to any managed properties, so we can find content via full-text search but cannot find under managed property:

Solution

Option #1.
Use queries like “Description:TextToSearch” (check also SharePoint KQL).

Option #2.
Do not use name “Description”.
Choose something else like “Short Description” or “Case Description”

Option #3.
Use existing site column “Description” from group:Custom Columns. It’s “single line of text” though. Note: “SharePoint Server Standard Site Collection features” must be activated.

The thing is it’s internal name is “CategoryDescription” and display name is “Description”. So if you add this column to the list – the content will be searchable:

Option #4
Create a new site column, name it e.g. “DescriptionSrchblClmn”.
Add this column to the list from existing site columns.
Rename it to “Description”.

Option #5.
Create your own managed property (e.g. “DescriptionSearchable”), make it searchable and map it to “ows_Description” crawled property.

ensure crawled property has “Include in full-text index” option ON:

NB: changing search schema affects other site lists/libraries.

Remember: if you made a change in search schema, run “Reindex site” under Site Settings -> “Search and Offline Availability”. It’s like on-prem “Full crawl” but works at web level.

================================

Links.

Microsoft: Manage the search schema in SharePoint
Microsoft: Keyword Query Language (KQL) syntax reference
Vladilen: Search for a crawled property name with wildcards
Microsoft: Overview of crawled and managed properties in SharePoint Server

Search schema: Search for a crawled property name wildcard

If you are managing SharePoint search, specifically if you are customizing SharePoint search schema, especially in SharePoint Online (Office 365) – you know how slow it works and how tiresome it is to “Search for a crawled property name”.

Recently I found out that wildcard works. No, even two wildcards work!

In this example I need crawled property started from ows and contains doc and type:

How to remove service accounts from people search in SharePoint or Office 365 (Classic search)

Update: for the same solution in modern search – please refer to “Hide non-personal accounts from modern Microsoft 365 search”

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

should work

Vlad Software Engineer

Microsoft 365 SharePoint, Teams, PowerShell, Azure, Search, Governance, Automation etc.

Tag Archives: Search

Searchable Custom User Profile Property in Microsoft 365

Scenario

What is Microsoft saying

Solution

Create a custom property under SharePoint Online User Profiles service

Synchronize Active Directory attribute to SharePoint Online User Profile

Configure Search Schema – map crawled property to managed property

Full-text search and/or query-based search

Refine search with custom property

Related articles:

Microsoft Search country-targeted bookmarks: new “Use Azure AD locations” flag

Use Azure AD locations

What if we do not “Use Azure AD locations” flag

What was before “Use Azure AD locations” flag

Office 365 Search scopes

How to find a public team in Microsoft Teams not knowing exact name

Detailed explanation on how to find a public Team

Scenario 1

Scenario 2

What Microsoft says

Solution

Video tutorial

Related articles:

SPO: Description, Owner fields are not searchable

Scenario:

Cause:

Solution:

Prove:

Explanation

Solution

Search schema: Search for a crawled property name wildcard

How to remove service accounts from people search in SharePoint or Office 365 (Classic search)