Skill Search

An interesting integration feature that was introduced with Lync 2010 and continues to be supported with Lync 2013 is skill search. Skill search enables Lync users to search skills, expertise, and organizational information from SharePoint My Sites. If users populate expertise information into fields in their SharePoint My Site, Lync users will be able to discover this information based on the content of these fields. For example, an IT Manager user might have a need to track down an internal resource with skills in a particular development platform. To find someone with these skills, the manager simply enters the search criteria in Lync, and a list of internal contacts who have flagged themselves as experts in that development language are listed. This integration feature can therefore result in a real-time savings, especially for a large organization, because it is no longer necessary to manually build a list of whom to contact for specific subjects. Users can instead build a dynamic searchable database of skills and organizational information right from the Lync client, which makes it much easier to find the right personnel to collaborate with.

To enable skill search, users must have a SharePoint deployment that includes My Sites. The full version of SharePoint must also be used, because Windows SharePoint Services is not compatible with skill search. The SharePoint search center URL is made available to Lync clients through in-band provisioning, which also means that SharePoint must be published to the Internet for remote users to take advantage of this feature.

To configure skill search, a Lync client policy must be configured and applied to the Lync clients specifying the SharePoint URLs. A single policy can be used to configure both the SPSearchInternalURL and the SPSearchExternalURL values. Using the Lync Server Management Shell, the following two commands are used, where <SPserver> is the name of the SharePoint Server:

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Set-CSClientPolicy -SPSearchInternalURL http://<SPserver>/_vti_bin/search.asmx
Set-CSClientPolicy -SPSearchExternalURL http://<SPserver>/_vti_bin/search.asmx

Optionally, the Search Center URL can also be configured to display at the bottom of the search results when users run a skill search query. To configure the URL to be displayed, the following two additional Management Shell commands would be used:

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Set-CSClientPolicy -SPSearchCenterInternalURL
http://<SPserver>/SearchCenter/Pages/PeopleResults.aspx
Set-CSClientPolicy -SPSearchCenterExternalURL http://<SPserver>/SearchCenter/Pages/PeopleResults.aspx

After these commands are run, a Lync client will pick up the change through in-band provisioning the next time the client is started. There are two ways to determine whether the skill search settings have been applied. First, as shown in Figure 21.14, when a user is searching a contact in the Lync client, two additional options are now listed: Name and Skill.

Figure 21.14. Skill search options in the Lync client.

The other way to determine whether skill search has been applied is by viewing the Lync client configuration settings. To access the Lync client configuration settings, hold down the Ctrl key and right-click on the Lync system tray icon in the lower-right corner of the desktop; then select Configuration Information from the menu. Included in the resulting Lync Configuration Information screen is the skill search URL, as shown in Figure 21.15.

Figure 21.15. Skill search URL in the Lync client configuration settings.

If results are found, at the bottom of the client an option is presented to view the results in SharePoint. This connects the user to the full SharePoint interface to display more detailed information about the results.