Do you know how to search employee skills? (Extending AD vs SharePoint vs Dynamics 365 CRM)
Last updated by Tiago Araújo [SSW] about 1 year ago.See historyAD has all your users e.g. Bob, Mary, Jane...
SharePoint also has all your users, plus you can extend this information using the UserProfile Service.
The beauty of this is that if everyone has updated their skills, it is wonderfully searchable.
SharePoint has an Admin UI to manage User Profiles.
Delve is a cool product with a nice UI that is essentially a portal onto the User Profiles.
Where it all falls down...
What if your people’s skills are stored in another system such as Dynamics 365 CRM or Salesforce?
You can use PowerShell and SharePoint PNP libraries to programmatically interact with the SharePoint UserProfile service. This process allows you to sync skills across systems with a custom solution:
OpenSearch is another solution, using the OpenSearch protocol you can add external data sources to your SharePoint search results.
Suggestions to Microsoft:
#1 Help me better sync my Dynamics 365 CRM data with the SharePoint user profile service
This should be a simple SharePoint connector so this piece of PowerShell glue is not required 👌
E.g. CRM user skills to User Profile properties
#2 Help me make Dynamics 365 CRM data searchable from SharePoint search
If not using a connector, we should be able to easily index and search through Dynamics 365 CRM data. This is essentially just calling a different API.
#3 Help me customise SharePoint search results
If you don’t want either of those options (i.e. you users’ skills are stored somewhere else), we should be able to change the search results UI.
E.g. Search for people here: https://ssw.com.au/people
#4 Help me search for user entities in Dynamics 365 CRM
There should be a global user search that goes across all entities in Dynamics 365 CRM.
