Customizing the Lotus Workplace People Finder and Directory Search

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Level: Intermediate

Keri Tuttle, Staff Software Engineer, IBM

11 Oct 2004

Lotus Workplace is all about helping you collaborate with other people. This article tells you how you can customize Lotus Workplace's People Finder and Directory Search features to help you find the right people you need to work with.

Release 2.0 of the Lotus Workplace family of products offers many ways to find people in your organization. The two components that allow you to search for people are People Finder and Directory Search. People Finder is a portlet available on many Lotus Workplace pages that lets you search for individuals in your organization and view detailed information about them, including name, phone number, and job title. People Finder also shows organizational views of employees, if this information is set up in your LDAP directory. Directory Search is a portlet used by other Lotus Workplace portlets that allows you to add people or groups to user/group lists, such as application memberships, Web conference invitees, and mailing lists from your corporate directory, external LDAP servers, personal address book, and team space member repositories.

In this article, we discuss several ways to customize People Finder and Directory Search. For these customizations, you need Administrator access to WebSphere Portal and Lotus Workplace. In addition, Lotus Workplace should already be installed on your system. We assume that you're an experienced system administrator familiar with Lotus Workplace. For more information on current Lotus Workplace functionality, see the developerWorks: Lotus article, "New features in release 2.0 of Lotus Workplace."

Configuring WebSphere Member Manager (WMM)

Lotus Workplace is configured to use Member Manager for IBM WebSphere Application Server (commonly called WebSphere Member Manager or simply WMM). Lotus Workplace uses WMM to manage member directory schemas. WMM handles member data or profiles, in which a member can be a person, group, organization, or organizational unit. The advantage to using WMM for Lotus Workplace is that WMM handles all the schema mapping for your LDAP directory and provides an extra repository store to take care of any additional attributes needed for Lotus Workplace applications. When deploying Lotus Workplace, your company can use its existing LDAP schema.

Because Lotus Workplace is using WMM APIs to access information in the LDAP directory, you may need to change or add attribute mappings in WMM to use new attributes in Lotus Workplace. For more information on WMM and LDAP attribute mapping, visit the WebSphere Portal InfoCenter.

The following section describes an example of how you can make changes to the WMM settings that affect Lotus Workplace and its people search features.

Changing your search base in WMM for both People Finder and Directory Search

In some cases, you may find that after you have enabled security in Lotus Workplace, you cannot search all the trees in your LDAP directory. The following changes allow you to do this. To make these changes, you need file-level access to WebSphere Portal. People Finder and Directory Search use WMM; therefore, you must modify the wmm.xml file. Changing the search base in wmm.xml will change your search results for both People Finder and Directory Search.

For example, suppose your site includes a user whose DN is

and another user with a DN of

If your search base is defined as

you cannot find users under the cn=managers tree, and therefore, you could not find the user kevinryans. To resolve this, you can edit the wmm.xml file to expand you search base so that it includes everything under l=Westford. You can also broaden the search by changing it to

Here are the steps to change your search base to search more branches of your LDAP:

1. Make a copy of the file <wp_root>/shared/app/wmm/wmm.xml.
2. Open wmm.xml in Notepad or a similar text editor.
3. Find the entry <SupportedLDAPEntryTypes> and find searchBases= for the object supportedLdapEntryType name="Person". This should appear similar to the following ("ibm-appUUIDAux" is not recommended for use with Lotus Workplace):
   

   <supportedLdapEntryTypes> <supportedLdapEntryType name="Person"rdnAttrTypes="uid" objectClassesForRead="inetOrgPerson" objectClassesForWrite="inetOrgPerson;searchBases="l=Westford, st=Massachusetts, c=US,ou=Lotus,o=Software group,dc=ibm,dc=com" />

   
   
   
4. Change the searchBases entry to the level where you would like to search from. For example, using the names from the preceding example, you could change the searchBases="c=US" to include all users at the level c=US and below. Bear in mind that the higher on the tree you go, the more areas you will have available for searching, but it may negatively impact performance.
5. Save the file and restart WebSphere Portal and the Lotus Workplace server.

After the servers have restarted, do a search in People Finder for a user in "cn=managers" for whom you could not previously find search results. You should now see the user's information included in the search results.

You can also change this setting for groups by editing the following:

<supportedLdapEntryTypes>
	<supportedLdapEntryType name="Group" rdnAttrTypes="cn" objectClassesForRead=
	    "groupOfUniqueNames; ibm-mailList" objectClassesForWrite="groupOfUniqueNames;
	    ibm-appUUIDAux"searchBases="cn=groups,l=Westford,st=Massachusetts,
	    c=US,ou=Lotus,o=Software group,dc=ibm,dc=com" />

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Customizing People Finder

People Finder consists of four major components: the Quick Search view, Advanced Search View, Person Record, and the Organizational View. There are many different customizations that can be done to each component in People Finder. Some of them include changing the way search results are viewed or how queries are performed. We will review the Basic Configuration Section, which is an important part of customizing People Finder. We will also discuss some of the ways you can customize the Person Record and Business Card section of the Person Record.

Setting Configuration Basics

The Configuration Basics show the WMM attributes that can be used with People Finder. To get to the Configuration Basics view:

1. Log into Lotus Workplace as an administrator, and go to the People Finder portlet:
   
   
   Figure 1. People Finder
   
   
2. In People Finder, click the wrench icon. This displays the Configuration Overview window.
   
   
   Figure 2. Configuration Overview
   
   
3. In the Configuration Overview window, click the Configuration Basics option:
   
   Figure 3. Configuration Basics
   
   

The Configuration Basics window lets you control what will be viewed and searched on throughout People Finder. It determines the number of search results you want returned when a user performs a search. It also controls which WMM attributes will be used with People Finder and its corresponding components. For example, if you remove the attribute "secretary," it will no longer be used for the Person Record, Search, or Organizational views.

If the information or attribute is not available in your LDAP server, the information will be blank in People Finder until you add it. For information on adding new attributes to your LDAP directory and mapping them to WMM, see the topic "Mapping LDAP Attributes" in the WebSphere Portal InfoCenter.

Customizing the Person Record view

The Person Record (not to be confused with the Domino Person document, which is sometimes called a Person record) is a view in Lotus Workplace that shows all available information about a person in the LDAP server. The Person Record uses the WMM data mapped in Configuration Basics to determine which attributes are viewable for a person. In some cases, you may find that you want the WMM attribute available throughout People Finder, but do not want it easily viewed in the Person Record. In this case, you need to remove attributes from the Person Record directory, but not from Configuration Basics.

The following procedure assumes that your company does not want to show the Employee number in the Person Record, so you will remove it. You will not be removing it from the People Finder Configuration Basics, so it will still be available to search on in Advanced Search:

1. Log into Lotus Workplace as an administrator.
2. Click the wrench icon in People Finder.
3. Under Page Layouts and Queries, click Person Record. This displays the following window:
   
   
   Figure 4. Person Record configuration window
   
   
4. Under "Fields to Display under each section of the Person Record," find the employeeNumber attribute.
5. Click the trash can icon next to the employeeNumber attribute to remove it from the Person Record.
6. Click OK. This brings you to the Configuration Overview window. (See Figure 2.)
7. In the Configuration Overview window, click Apply Changes Now.

You do not need to restart the servers to see your changes. Perform a search in People Finder and open a Person Record. Notice that the employee number listing is no longer available.

You can use these same steps to add attributes to the Person Record. Instead of deleting an existing attribute, you can choose a new one from the "Select a field to add" list box. After you add the field, you can use the up/down arrows to determine where in the listing you want your new attribute to be viewed.

Editing the Business Card

One very nice feature of the Person Record is the ability to view a picture of a person, along with some quick contact information displayed at the top of the record (where it appears immediately beneath the photograph). Collectively, this photograph and the contact information fields are known as the person's Business Card.

Adding a photograph
In this section, we discuss how to enable the Business Card section of the Person Record to display a JPEG image of a person instead of the default generic graphic shown in Figure 5:

These instructions assume you do not have a JPEG attribute set up with WMM. If you do have a JPEG attribute available in your LDAP directory and it is mapped in WMM with a different attribute, you will have fewer steps.

First, an attribute needs to be added to your LDAP directory. Because LDAP directories are all different, we will not go through the steps for adding attributes. Instead, refer to your LDAP documentation for information on how to expand your schema. In your LDAP, add the attribute jpegPhoto and add a photo to the attribute. By default, the jpegPhoto is enabled in People Finder. These steps will verify that the Person Record is still set up to accept the new attribute:

1. Open People Finder and go to the Configuration Overview window.
2. In the Shared Components section, click the Business Card option.
3. Under Photograph, make sure the Include photo option is selected and that the attribute is listed as jpegPhoto. (If you already have an attribute defined in WMM, it should show in the list for you to choose from.)
4. Close the window and click Apply Changes Now in the Configuration Overview window.

Open People Finder and search for the person you added the photo to in your LDAP directory. Open the Person Record and view the Business Card to see the photo you added.

Changing Business Card information
You can also change the information displayed in the Business Card section. As with other areas of the Person Record, you can add and remove attributes. To add an additional attribute to the Business Card, do the following:

1. Open People Finder and go to the Configuration Overview window.
2. Select the Business Card option in the Shared Components section.
3. Under "Fields to Display in the Business Card," choose the attribute you want listed, for example, Assistant.
4. Use the up and down arrows to reorder the attributes displayed on the Business Card.
5. Close the window and click Apply Changes Now in the Configuration Overview window.

Figure 6 shows a modified Business Card that includes a photograph as well as the name of the person's assistant:

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Customizing Directory Search

As previously mentioned, Directory Search is used by many different portlets such as mail, calendar, team space, Web conferencing, and instant messaging in Lotus Workplace. This section discusses how you can reorder or modify the column headings and add additional searchable directories to Directory Search. We use the mail portlet in our examples. All changes made to Directory Search will also show in other portlets where applicable. However, not all Lotus Workplace portlets offer the ability to choose which directory to search.

Changing the column headings to view different information about a person

By default, Directory Search displays the following properties:

Figure 7 displays the default settings for Directory Search:

You can change these settings to instruct Directory Search to display other information. For example, instead of Directory Search displaying the user's cn, you can specify that the user's displayname appears. Or instead of ibm-primaryEmail, you can tell Directory Search to display the user's uid attribute. The third property is optional, but is set to the ibm-jobTitle by default.

To change the default column headings, do the following:

1. Log into the WebSphere Application Server administrative console (http://servername.company.com:9091/admin).
2. Click Lotus Workplace.
3. Click Directories.
4. Click Directory Settings for Searching. The General Properties screen (Figure 7) appears.
5. Change "WMM attribute for the user's display name" to ibm-primaryEmail.
6. Change "WMM attribute for first item of additional user information" to displayName.
7. Leave "WMM attribute for second item of additional user information" blank.
8. Save the settings.
9. Restart WebSphere Portal and the Lotus Workplace server.

Figure 8 illustrates the Directory Search bar before customization:

And Figure 9 shows how the Directory Search looks with these new settings. Now you see the user's email address first and the display name second. Also notice that the third column is now blank:

Adding additional searchable directories

Directory Search also allows you to search additional LDAP directories. If you make changes to the way Directory Search views the search results and you now want additional searchable directories to display results the same way, you must change the General Properties settings. To do this:

1. Log into the administrative console (http://servername.company.com:9091/admin).
2. Click Lotus Workplace.
3. Click Directories.
4. Click Additional Searchable directories.
5. Click New.
6. Fill in your information for your LDAP server (fields shown in bold are required, the rest are optional):
   
   Directory name is the name of the additional directory you want Directory Search to examine when performing a search.
   
   Attribute for the user's display name is the LDAP attribute to use for displaying user names. You only need to set this if you are not using the WebSphere Application Server registry; otherwise, Lotus Workplace obtains the attribute from the directory settings.
   
   Attribute for the first item of additional user information is the first LDAP attribute to use to display additional information to users when they search and find multiple identical names. If you leave this blank, the email address is used.
   
   Attribute for the first item of additional user information is the second LDAP attribute to display when multiple identical names are returned.
   
   Search restrictions is a radio button. Choices are Users and groups and Users only.
   
   Name lookup timeout is the time period (in seconds) to allow before aborting the search request.
   
   Search user filter is the LDAP filter clause to use to search the directory.
   
   Group filter is the LDAP filter clause to use to search the directory.
   
   Display order is the order in which the person document fields are displayed. This order will be used by instant messaging, the personal address book, and WMM. For example, if you can auto-provision your mail account, then you must have a personal address book and instant messaging store.
   
   Authentication type defines how to authenticate with the LDAP server.
   
   Bind distinguished name is the distinguished name that WebSphere Application Server uses to bind to the directory service.
   
   Bind password is the password that WebSphere Application Server uses to bind to the directory service.
   
   Type of LDAP server should be set to Domino.
   
   Host is the LDAP host name or IP address.
   
   Port is the LDAP server port. The default is usually 389 (636 if SSL is enabled).
   
   Use SSL enables SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) with LDAP.
   
   Base distinguished name is the location in the directory tree at which to begin the search.
   
   Figure 10 shows the General Properties window with required fields marked by red asterisks:
   
   
   Figure 10. General Properties
   
   Notice that with a new searchable directory, you can change the attribute listings for column displays. If you change the defaults in the Directory Search for the column headings and you want the additional searchable directory to be the same, you must add the attributes you used to the second through fourth fields in this view. If you leave the optional fields blank, it will use the Lotus Workplace default settings.
   
   For more information about completing the General Properties fields, see the Lotus Workplace InfoCenter.
7. Save this form.
8. Save the form to the configuration. (In WebSphere administration, you can make multiple changes to the server configuration and save each individual change. The changes will not take effect until you save the current session changes to the WebSphere master configuration and restart the servers.)
9. Restart WebSphere Portal and the Lotus Workplace server.

After the servers restart, open the mail portlet to bring up the Directory Search window. You will now see your new LDAP directory in the Search in list. You can search for any user from the base distinguished name you entered when you added the new searchable directory.

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Conclusion

In this article, we have shown several ways you can configure People Finder and Directory Search in Lotus Workplace. The important thing to remember when changing schemas in your LDAP and adding new attributes is to make sure they are mapped in the WebSphere Member Manager so that the attributes are visible by Lotus Workplace.

Resources

• For more information on current Lotus Workplace functionality, see the developerWorks: Lotus article, "New features in release 2.0 of Lotus Workplace."
  
  
• And for additional details about WebSphere Member Manager and LDAP attribute mapping, visit the WebSphere Portal InfoCenter.
  
  
• Get involved in the developerWorks community by participating in developerWorks blogs.
  
  
• Browse for books on these and other technical topics.
  

About the author

		Keri Tuttle joined Lotus/IBM in 2000 and has been working with Lotus Workplace since Release 1.1. She is currently a Staff Software Engineer for the Lotus Workplace Application Tools Development Team.

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