SharePoint Online Search is no longer returning People results when logged in as an external user

Question

Calling the search API or using search web parts is no longer returning People results, when logged in as an external user. This was working for years for me, and stopped in early November 2017. I have verified this in three tenants both as an internal and external user to those tenants. Microsoft Support has been giving me the run-around for more than a month now, and most of them are having difficulty understanding that I'm not talking about people pickers (which continue to work).

Is anyone aware of a change deployed by Microsoft which might have caused this (i.e. was it intentional)? Is there a workaround for this?

Example URL: https://mytenant.sharepoint.com/sites/demo/_api/search/query?querytext='Bob'&sourceid='b09a7990-05ea-4af9-81ef-edfab16c4e31'&clienttype='ContentSearchRegular'

The sourceid guid of b09a7990-05ea-4af9-81ef-edfab16c4e31 is for "Local People Results," which is scoped to ContentClass=urn:content-class:SPSPeople. I've also reproduced this by configuring search web parts with that ContentClass against the regular result source.

As an internal user, I get a result back from the above URL. As an external user, even one with site collection administrator permissions, I get no error from the search API, but I also get no results back.

Answer 1

Well, Microsoft Support is still giving me the runaround on this, but their official answer is that searching People as an external user isn't supposed to work, even though it used to, and they won't provide any documentation to that end. So either someone decided it's a security issue they don't want to document, or the support channel just gave up and gave me a BS answer. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

As a workaround, based on this blog post I've found that I can still query the /_api/SP.UI.ApplicationPages.ClientPeoplePickerWebServiceInterface.clientPeoplePickerSearchUser endpoint, even with a partial search string, and get results back.

For my custom user-picker control, now instead of using the /_api/search endpoint, I'm using the above one. Here's some sample code if it's helpful for anyone else.

var url = _spPageContextInfo.webAbsoluteUrl + '/_api/SP.UI.ApplicationPages.ClientPeoplePickerWebServiceInterface.clientPeoplePickerSearchUser';
$.ajax({
    'url': url,
    'method': 'POST',
    'data': JSON.stringify({
        'queryParams': {
            '__metadata': {
                'type': 'SP.UI.ApplicationPages.ClientPeoplePickerQueryParameters'
            },
            'AllowEmailAddresses': true,
            'AllowMultipleEntities': true,
            'AllUrlZones': false,
            'MaximumEntitySuggestions': 50,
            'PrincipalSource': 15,
            'PrincipalType': 15,
            'QueryString': 'Romp'
            //'Required':false,
            //'SharePointGroupID':null,
            //'UrlZone':null,
            //'UrlZoneSpecified':false,
            //'Web':null,
            //'WebApplicationID':null
        }
    }),
    'headers': {
        'accept': 'application/json;odata=verbose',
        'content-type': 'application/json;odata=verbose',
        'X-RequestDigest': $('#__REQUESTDIGEST').val()
    },
    'success': function(data) {
        var userData = JSON.parse(data.d.ClientPeoplePickerSearchUser);
        console.log(userData);
    },
    'error': function(err) {
        console.error(err);
    }
});

And this is the response that comes back, which includes everything I need for my control (though if it didn't, I could use the Key value and call EnsureUser to get the SP user ID).

[{
    "Key": "i:0#.f|membership|chris.romp_XXX.com#ext#@MYCLIENT.onmicrosoft.com",
    "Description": "i:0#.f|membership|chris.romp_XXX.com#ext#@MYCLIENT.onmicrosoft.com",
    "DisplayText": "Chris Romp",
    "EntityType": "",
    "ProviderDisplayName": "",
    "ProviderName": "",
    "IsResolved": false,
    "EntityData": {
        "Email": "chris.romp@XXX.com",
        "SPUserID": "24",
        "AccountName": "i:0#.f|membership|chris.romp_XXX.com#ext#@MYCLIENT.onmicrosoft.com",
        "PrincipalType": "User"
    },
    "MultipleMatches": []
}]

Answer 2

Per my test in my SharePoint online environment, it will return the external users when searching from the local people Results(System) by search box or search API.

To troubleshoot the issue, you could check if the external users are in the active users in admin center.