Do you know how to search employee skills? (Extending AD vs SharePoint vs Dynamics 365 CRM)

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AD 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](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/manage-user-profiles?WT.mc_id=M365-MVP-33518).

The beauty of this is that if everyone has updated their skills, it is wonderfully searchable.
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SharePoint has an Admin UI to manage User Profiles.


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[Delve](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/what-is-delve-1315665a-c6af-4409-a28d-49f8916878ca) is a cool product with a nice UI that is essentially a portal onto the User Profiles.


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Where it all falls down...

What if your people’s skills are stored in another system such as Dynamics 365 CRM or Salesforce?


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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:


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OpenSearch is another solution, using the OpenSearch protocol you can [add external data sources to your SharePoint search results](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/search/understanding-result-sources-for-search?WT.mc_id=M365-MVP-33518).

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#### 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>


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**[\#4 Help me search for user entities in Dynamics 365 CRM](https://experience.dynamics.com/ideas/idea/?ideaid=b5daa141-90f5-eb11-ba5e-0003ff457d0a)**

There should be a global user search that goes across all entities in Dynamics 365 CRM.


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