Communicator 14 provides functionality to be able to search for contacts not just by name, but by skill.  For example a customer service agent at an airline can search for other agents with Travel Advisory experience by typing the search criteria into the Communicator search box and performing a search by keyword. 

The search results will return users who have specified that skill in their profile on their SharePoint My Site.  This is actually pretty easy to configure, Ill show you how.

Create Search and People Search Results Pages in SharePoint

Communicator 14 Expert Search works by using the SharePoint 2010 Search Service to search SharePoint for user profiles with matching keywords. 

This requires that you have an Enterprise Search site in your site collection which includes the search service and also the People Results pages.  The easiest way to do this is to create a Search Center site in your site collection.

Note: I get an error when trying to create an Enterprise Search site in a Team Site in the SharePoint 2010 RTM bits, so I created it as a site collection that is evident in the URLs you see below.

In the screenshots below, you can see that the URL of the SharePoint search service in the Search site collection is http://sps2010/sites/search/_vti_bin/search.asmx, and the URL of the People Search Results page is http://sps2010/sites/Search/Pages/peopleresults.aspx.

Point Communications Server 14 to Search and People Search Results Pages

For Communicator 14 to be able to perform an Expert Search, you need to configure Communications Server 14 to point to the Search Service and People Search Results page URLs.

From a server with the OCS Core bits installed, fire up the Communications Server Management Shell and type Get-CsClientPolicy.

Scroll down to the bottom of the output, were interested in setting the values of:

• SPSearchInternalURL
• SPSearchExternalURL
• SPSearchCenterInternalURL
• SPSearchCenterExternalURL

SPSearchInternalURL and SPSearchExternalURL correspond to the internal and external URLs of the SharePoint search service in the Search site collection, while SPSearchCenterInternalURL and SPSearchCenterExternalURL correspond to the internal and external URLs of the people search results pages.

Well use the Communications Server Management Shell to set the values of these CS policy properties.

For simplicity, Im only going to set the internal URLs here.

Set-CsClientPolicy SPSearchInternalURL http://sps2010/sites/search/_vti_bin/search.asmx
    -SPSearchCenterInternalURL http://sps2010/sites/Search/Pages/peopleresults.aspx

Log out and back into Communicator. 

You can verify that these settings were applied by running the Get-CsClientPolicy cmdlet again from the Communications Server Management Shell.

However, theres another super-secret ninja trick to verify that the settings were applied:

• Find the Communicator icon in the Windows System Tray
• Hold down the Ctrl button
• Click (left) the Communicator icon in the Windows System Tray do not depress the Ctrl button

You should now see an extra menu item called Configuration Information, click it.

Scroll down and locate the Expert Search URL and SharePoint Search Center URL keys and verify that their values correspond to those you set using the Set-CsClientPolicy PowerShell cmdlet.

Configure a Sharepoint User Profile Import

Im not going to provide detailed steps here except to say that you need to configure the SharePoint 2010 User Profile  Service Application to import user account details from Active Directory on a scheduled basis.

This is a critical step because there are several user profile properties e.g. SipAddress that are only populated by a user profile import. 

When performing an Expert Search, Communicator can only render results for users who have a SipAddress specified.

Add Skills to User Profiles

Navigate to your My Site and click on My Profile.  This page allows you to set many contact details that are searchable in SharePoint. 

Were particularly interested in the Ask Me About property of a users profile.  Expert Search searches against this property to find users with matching skills.

Configure a SharePoint Search Crawl

Ensure that you have a scheduled job to crawl your Local SharePoint Sites content source. 

Depending on how you have this configured, it will also crawl the My Site site collection and add user properties such as Ask Me About to the search index.

Thats It!

SharePoint 2010 provides new social and collaboration features to help users find other users with similar skills or interests.

Expert Search extends this functionality directly into Microsoft Communicator 14, allowing you to interact with the users directly from the search results.

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