People search in SharePoint using partial names - search

Question

My employer is switching their internal portal over to SharePoint. One of the highly used features of the previous portal was a 'people search' that allowed partial names. SharePoint 2007 defaults to keyword searches which only match against the exact word(s) given as search terms. It can do full-text searches but you have to provide the property name, e.g. "FirstName:tom" (without the quotes of course). That works for a programmatic solution but not for end users.
Is there a way in SharePoint 2007 to let users search for people using partial names?

Answer 1

I found this solution that works well enough for us.
Add a ContentEditor web part to the target page and go to the HTML editor button. Add the following HTML code. It creates two input fields (firstname/lastname) and then creates a query with the search terms included as property searches which will invoke the full-text search.
Note: you need to replace the search result page with the appropriate location for your configuration.
<script language="javascript">
//function to handle enter on keyboard
function txtWildPeopleFinder_KeyDown(e)
{
if (e.keyCode == 13 || e.keyCode==10)
{
e.returnValue=false;
DoWildPeopleSearch();
return false;
}
else
return true;
}
//escape apostrophes in search strings
function escapestr(str)
{
return str.replace("'","%22");
}
//search function
function DoWildPeopleSearch()
{
var firstname = escapestr(document.all["firstname"].value);
var lastname = escapestr(document.all["lastname"].value);
var url;
//search on last name
if(firstname == "")
{
url = "/searchcenter/Pages/peopleresults.aspx?k=LastName%3A" + lastname;
window.location=url;
return;
}
//search on first name
if(lastname == "")
{
url = "/searchcenter/Pages/peopleresults.aspx?k=FirstName%3A" + firstname;
window.location=url;
return;
}
//first and last
url = "/searchcenter/Pages/peopleresults.aspx?k=lastname%3A" + lastname + "%20FirstName%3A" + firstname;
window.location=url;
return;
}
</script>
<table cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" border="0" width="100%" ID="Table3">
<tr>
<td width="80" nowrap>
First Name:
</td>
<td width="100%">
<input size="20" maxlength="100" id="firstname" name="firstname" type="text" onkeydown="txtWildPeopleFinder_KeyDown(event)">
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="80" nowrap>
Last Name:
</td>
<td>
<input size="20" maxlength="100" id="lastname" name="lastname" type="text" onkeydown="txtWildPeopleFinder_KeyDown(event)">
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> </td>
<td>
<input type="button" onclick="DoWildPeopleSearch()" value="Search">
</td>
</tr>
</table>