Sunday, August 4, 2013

User Profiles missing from SharePoint 2010 People Search Results

Pleasantly surprising how a small configuration change can correct seemingly unrelated errors - people search in a SharePoint 2010 site which I assist with was missing hundreds of people from the search results listing.

The search log was showing a large number of errors stating "Error in PortalCrawl Web Service" each associated with a URL for the person.aspx page with an accountname in the querystring. Clicking on any of these URLs from the crawl log gave a "User not found" error. An interesting thing in these was that the account names had the wrong delimiting character - they were showing domain/username rather than domain\username.

Also there was one top level error stating showing that the crawl of the sps3 source failed. This was due to the default content access account not having the necessary administrator permissions on the User Profile service application. Granting the "Retrieve People Data for Search Crawlers" permission for that account solved the Top Level error, and also had the effect of removing all the crawl log entries for the person.aspx crawl.

So the users are now showing in the search results, and everyone is happy!

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