External users in SharePoint 2013 people search

Question

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.

Answer 1

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.