Delve Searching on Custom Fields

[Kathleen Eagan]

Our organization has a business case that needs additional searching capability in Delve so we can search on the Additional fields showing up in the profile for people.  For example:  Employee id, Department Name, Job Titles.   Can the Delve searching capabilities be expanded to do more customized searches ?

Thanks,

Kathleen Eagan

[#2]

You can indeed, it's just a PITA:

Create the User Profile Properties (if you've not already done it):

1. Admin Centre | Admin Centres | SharePoint | User Profiles | Manage User Properties | New Property
2. Set the Name, DisplayName & Type as you need them
3. Check Search Settings | Indexed is ticked
4. Set Default Privacy Setting to Everyone
5. OK

Enter some data into the new filed for a user to give the indexing service something to index. If you ticked Allow users to edit values for this property and Show on the Edit Details page in the previous step, you can do this through Delve. If it's Admin-only stuff like EmployeeID, you can do it individually via Admin Centre | Admin Centres | SharePoint | User Profiles | Manage User Profiles | [Find & pick a user] | Edit my profile, or via PowerShell/CSOM.

Wait for your new field to show up as a Crawled Property. 

1. Browse to your Enterprise Search site and/or your root Site Collection
2. Go to Site Settings | Site Collection Administration | Search Schema | Crawled Properties

When it's showed up, create a Managed Property based on the Crawled Property:

1. Site Settings | Site Collection Administration | Search Schema | Managed Properties | New Managed Property
2. Pick appropriate Name, Type, Searchable & Queryable values based on the crawled property you're exposing and how you want users to be able to find it.
3. Advanced Searchable Settings | Full-text index must be set to PeopleIdx
4. Retrievable must be ticked
5. Everything else is up to you. It depends on the field, but if you users to search for it, you probably need Searchable ticked.