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Hello SharePoint people.

There is a branch in the company (Domain A + SP 2013) which has its own domain (Domain B + SP 2010). There is no trust set up between the domains and they are not on the same network. Recently a requirement came up to include people from Domain B in Domain's A people search results.

Due to security reasons we cannot create AD User accounts for them. I am aware that I won't be able to achieve that through the User Profile Services using BDC as that would only synchronize user properties but not the user profiles.

Could anyone recommend an approach to this? Does SharePoint create User Profiles for AD Contacts (Not AD Users)? Or would it be best to try to achieve that with Result Sources in Search Service Application?

Any help appreciated.

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  • SharePoint support multiple connection to different AD's You can create a trusted connection between ad's – Marco Jan 22 '16 at 12:50
  • Domain B is not on the same newtork as Domain A. We would have an internet facing web service to consume the data or move the data files between the two networks in another way (maybe secure FTP). – Paul Strupeikis Jan 22 '16 at 12:53
  • Yea you mention that. I haved a client with his corporate office in Chile (yes the country) and a second office in Mexico, more or less like your client. – Marco Jan 22 '16 at 14:01
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I have done something similar when the requirement was only search. In our case these were contractors who never had domain credentials. Here is the rough outline of the solution:

  1. Create a "Contractor" Content Type based on the Contact Content Type (customize as necessary) and a list using that Content Type.
  2. Populate the list with a few items.
  3. Crawl the list
  4. Map the crawled properties to the corresponding people managed properties or create new ones (ensuring they are added to PeopleIdx).
  5. Change the default People Result Source to include your new Contractor Content Type. (Also add it as an exclusion to the default All Sources Result Source.)
  6. If necessary create a new Display Template (we did so you could tell visually who was an employee and who was a contractor).

What I like most about this solution is that we scripted the "sync" with PowerShell against a custom database. It was very easy to maintain and enhance. We even created a "Profile" page that the search result was linked to.

100% out of the box.

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  • Thank you for the answer. How can you get those external names to come up as search suggestions (autocomplete in the search box)? – Paul Strupeikis Apr 8 '16 at 13:12
  • Out of the box the SharePoint search box doesn't do "auto complete". You'd have to roll your own with JavaScript and the Search API. – Matthew McDermott Apr 8 '16 at 16:36
  • Sorry for not being clear, Matthew. I had search result suggestions in mind. These do come out of the box for profiles from AD - when you start typing a name, a box underneath displays a couple of suggestions. These work for SP users, but not Contacts. – Paul Strupeikis Apr 8 '16 at 17:24
  • Prequery suggestions come from the query logs for "successful" query hits. You can use powershell to populate them or just let the system pick up the users interaction. I have done this for the Everything tab but not tried it for people. It has nothing to do with the content (in your case contacts). It's all about the keyword. – Matthew McDermott Apr 8 '16 at 18:03

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