Surfacing a new User Profile Property in SharePoint Search

 

As part of a Document Management or Intranet project I have often been asked to add a new property to the User Profile Properties. 

Some of the more common purposes are:

Employee Number

Initials

Team (subdivision of Department)

It seems to be a fairly common request as questions about how to enable searching on those new properties occur often in the PnP Modern Search Web Parts GitHub project.

I have used these links as a reference for making a new User Property searchable:

How to create searchable user profile properties in SharePoint Online | RLV Blog (rlvision.com)

Tech and me: How to: Make sure User Profile properties are free/full-text searchable (techmikael.com)

https://pnp.github.io/script-samples/spo-request-pnp-reindex-user-profile/README.html?tabs=pnpps

Warning: patience is required when working with Search 

New videos on YouTube: Useful tools when working with Search

 

Both when answering questions and handling issues on the PnP Modern Search GitHub project and in my daytime job as a Senior Solution Architect with Fellowmind I work a lot with both Microsoft and SharePoint Search related issues.

When people report an issue with Microsoft Search or the PnP Modern Search web parts the root cause is often related to either:

• The KQL query is not correct
• The fields they are missing has not been created as Site Columns 
• The fields have not been turned into crawled properties as the users has forgotten to add content in the list/library
• The crawled property has not been mapped or mapped incorrectly

When this kind of issues shows up in a Search Results web part or in the Out Of The Box search it is pretty difficult to debug, hence this blog post and the Useful tools when working with Search series on YouTube:

Episode 1 is about Using the SP Editor

Episode 2 is about Using the SP Query Tool 

Episode 3 is about Using the Graph Explorer ( planned for week 18, early May)

  

If you have any ideas about additional tools or methods that would be useful when debugging a search related issue please let me know on twitter