SharePoint People Search Autocomplete

Back in July, Jan Tielens demonstrated how to write an autocomplete mechanism for SharePoint search. Muhimbi then proposed a greatly enhanced version 2.

In our version, we have enhanced the code just a little to enable the following:

• paging: you can display results n at a time, and offer a link to go to the next page

• sorting: allow users to refresh results by alphabetical order, by department, etc. (you can add your own sorting criteria)

• search across all people metadata:  let people either search on name, skills, office number, phone number, or any other indexed metadata you include in the search query

• Rich formatted results: display picture, presence awareness (Office Communicator) and links to internal or external systems (Yammer, Skype, Facebook, etc.)

• Refine search results: allow users to click on any metadata on the autocomplete search to drill down into specific criteria

Example of the final result:

To implement this version of the people search autocomplete, copy the code below, modify it as you need (mandatory: modify the server name), and paste it on a Content Editor web part.