SuccessFactors Solr Powered People Search

This is my last blog for 2017 and I want to end the year by sharing with my readers this extremely useful feature. It is our Global People Search powered by Solr which is a Lucene based Search Index. If you are a large corporation with more than 10000 employees, you will find this feature very useful that will enable you to search for your employees quickly and filter your People Search results by certain organization parameters like Division, Department, Location and Job Title.

Example: John Smith Operations will bring all John Smiths in Operations Division

Or Mary Jane HR will bring Mary Jane in your HR department.

How can you enable the feature?

For live customers you will need to log an incident with our support team to enable this feature and provide your company Id and datacenter with the incident and for the implementing customers you can reach out to your consultants to enable this wonderful feature in your environment. The feature is turned on using a provisioning flag under Company settings.

The pre-requisite to enabling the feature is to enable Action Search and Role Based Permission.

You can enable these flags if you or your customer use multiple languages in SuccessFactors and alternate name fields and you want to enable People search on those fields as well.

Benefits of Solr Powered People Search

Quick Employee Search Results

Once you enable People Search powered by Solr, it creates a view  with all your users in the system using many keywords and also add  indexes for these key fields. When you search for an employee the system searches on an indexed view based on your keywords that is refreshed on the background constantly. Since the system scans through the view, the end users retrieves the search results much faster as it does not make database calls which is more time consuming.

Filter Search Results by Org Entities

There are many common first name and last name in the same organization. To make sure you are selecting the right person from your search results, the system allows you to add an search on name with a combination of Org entities like  Division. Department, Location and Job Title which filters down the results and give you specific employee in that org entity which can help you select the exact person you are looking for.

Search Results Before:

After

Support Accent characters Search in People Search

The Solr power People Search supports accent characters search as it has mapped the accent characters to the English characters.

For example; if last name is “Kühner”, and you want to get this people by searching “Kuhner”, it’s supported by Solr People Search

Supports Search on Alternate Name fields

The Solr powered People Search also supports the search on alternate name fields which was earlier not possible

Future of People Search

New Enhancements to People Search will be added to Solr powered People Search.

How are the People Search sorted?

The global header people search behavior is enhanced in 1711 to specify the ranking weight for people search keywords:

The search fields are ranked in following 3 categories: –

1. firstName, lastName, mi, nickname, username
2. preferredName, displayName, formalName, formalNameAlt1, formalNameAlt2, displayNameAlt1, displayNameAlt2, secondLastName, firstNameAlt1, firstNameAlt2, lastNameAlt1, lastNameAlt2, middleNameAlt1, middleNameAlt2, partnerName, partnerNamePrefix, title
3. location, location_t, division, division_t, department, department_t, personIdExternal

With this search results ranking, by entering their location, department, division etc. the John Smith (common Name) searches would be more precise.

Conclusion

This is really useful feature for all customers and even though the benefits are substantial for larger customers even our smaller customers have nothing to loose by enabling this cool feature. This is the future of search within SuccessFactors so get onboard and delight your users by enabling this feature.