How to: Configure People Search Directory on SharePoint 2013

People search can be important to an organization when you need to find someone with a specific skill. One thing is to display the search box and you can find for someone but, that doesn't offer a great user experience. The other way is to display a people directory and provide option to filter them and narrow the results such as department, job title, location etc. based on some criteria which is called Refinement in SharePoint terms.

Here I'm going to show you how to configure the latter. This can be setup using the SharePoint 2013 search web part.

What you are looking at at the end of this configuration is this.

Here are the steps that you will follow:

• Assuming that you already have the Search Service and User Profile Service setup. Navigate to Site Settings > Under Look and Feel select Page Layouts and Site Templates
• Select (Welcome Page) Search People and (Welcome Page) Search Results under Page Layouts section.

• Now Navigate to Pages Library and select New Document > Page
• On the Create Page screen select Search People page layout, write an appropriate name for the page and select Create.
• This web part will not show any results until we specify a query. To show all the people by default, we need to modify the query for People Search Core Results Web Part. Select Change Query button in the web part properties. Under Basics select Property contentclass under Property Filter and enter spspeople as the manual value as shown below.

• Now, we will have the list of people displayed. To configure refinement filters, to show other metadata properties that are defined in our search center, select the Choose refiners option on the refinement web part. Select Department and Job Title. Note that the managed property must have the ‘Refinable’ option selected in the search schema for it to be available in this list.

For further configurations like sorting and table based layouts, I found this very helpful.

Enhance the search experience!

How to fix: SharePoint 2013 Search not working and EPM / PWA is slow

Where do you start debugging the issue? I first checked the Search Service Application

• Navigate to Central Admin
• Under System Settings select Manage services on server
• Select SharePoint Server Search and check Search Service Application

Sure enough, it pointed out what's wrong.

Issue

The Search Service Application Topology was throwing an error:

Unable to retrieve topology component health states. This may be because the admin component is not up and running.

Resolution Steps

I referred to the SharePoint ULS logs and noticed that the Query Processing Component was throwing the following error:

There was no endpoint listening at [URL] that could access the message.

Tried IMS endpoints for operation execution: operation sent to IMS failed: Resource saturation, Try again later

This pointed out that the search service was trying to use a resource but something was limiting the usage.

Solution

The issue was resolved by configuring the noderunner.exe.config file by changing the value of the node <memoryLimitMegaBytes> to 0 (zero).

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\15.0\Search\Runtime\1.0\noderunner.exe.config

Further References

http://blogs.technet.com/b/mpriem/archive/2012/09/05/sharepoint-2013-preview-hungry-search-service.aspx

To identify which noderunner.exe is taking up all the memory, please follow this URL:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/kristopherloranger/archive/2014/03/24/sharepoint-2013-noderunner-exe-process-information.aspx