I travel by train  to the office regularly now. Although this sometimes takes longer than driving, it is more consistent and it gives a couple of hours a day where I can do some reading without interuption (plus I feel I'm doing my bit for the planet! :) )

This will seem geeky, but I get fed up listening to CD's or the radio (though Classic FM is a great soother) and have recently started getting the SharePoint podcasts. personally I find the podcasts easier than webcasts (perhaps because I don't have the distraction of the PC?). You can download the mp3's or find them via iTunes

These are hosted by our friends at Lightning and have some great content for developers and administrators.

Quite often you will need to customise the search results and ensure that your custom metadata mappings are displaying correctly.

To view the raw results, I undertake the following...

a) Edit the results page (results, or people depending on what you are looking to modify

b) Add a new core results web part (again people or results)

c) Add your columns, fixed queries etc

d) Click the Edit XSLT button and replace the XSLT with the following

Save everything and you can now see the raw results.

Following the previous post on search, this shows how to simply and quickly show a single users profile details on a page. Note, that this intended for MOSS (where we have the profile database) but could be re-worked for WSS to show details from the user list.

On our page, we need to add the People Search Core Results Part

Once added, open the web part properties so we can configure the part. We need to make several changes....

a) Under the Results Display / View group, set the Results Default View to Relveance and Results per page to 1

b) Under the Results Query Options group, change the Cross Web Part Query ID to Query 2 (see also note below)

c) Under the Miscellanous group, uncheck all the options except  Show Search Results

d) Finally, in the Fixed Keyword Query option, enter the query required (e.g. LastName:Piper)

Save the changes.

The final result will be basic details from the profile databse about our user

If the appearance needs to be changed, then you can edit the XSLT (another future post I think!) to suit.

Note - you may need more than one profile - in this case, the Cross Web Part Query ID needs to unique for each part on the page.

If you have more than 3 user profiles to display, then consider using different queries to get multiple results. For example, to show all users who have the property Department:Sales to show all sales members. If doing this, the number of search results should be increased from 1!