Crawling User Profiles

About this task

The OneDrive for Business connector supports crawling OneDrive for Business User Profiles. Enabling this feature requires configuring your search collection seed and a basic understanding of OneDrive user profiles.

Note: By default, the OneDrive for Business connector does not crawl OneDrive User Profiles. This feature must be enabled in the search collection seed configuration. The reason for this is that OneDrive URLs vary based on how OneDrive is set up. Invariably, different OneDrive site names and other URL constructions preclude having a default crawl mechanism for OneDrive user profiles.

OneDrive user profiles are typically made up of components such as basic biographical information, membership lists, skills, departments, phone numbers, images, colleagues, and quick links. The OneDrive for Business connector will also preserve original security settings associated with content. Each component is assigned one of several security settings:

  • Everyone - All users have access to content that is associated with this permission level. This type of content is publicly accessible and will then be included in subsequent crawls.
  • My Manager - Only a user's manager can access content assigned this security level.
  • My Team - Content is available to all other users that make up the user's immediate team.
  • My Colleague - other users designated as only colleagues can view such content.
Tip: The OneDrive for Business connector supports privacy polices and user profile properties. Most search engines that crawl OneDrive do not offer this feature. Private and Everyone ACLs are supported. No Index attributes are supported as well.

To enable crawling OneDrive For Business User Profiles, navigate to the Crawling Configuration page of your search collection in the Watson™ Explorer Engine administration tool and do the following:

Procedure

  1. In your Seed Component page select Edit. The Seed Component edit page displays.
  2. Select the User Profiles section. The Users Profiles section expands.
  3. Click the box to check the Crawl profile information from personal sites setting.
  4. Enable Crawl all OneDrive for Business Sites within an organization if you would like the connector to auto-discover all the OneDrive for Business Site Collections.
  5. The Base URL for OneDrive for Business Sites and Base URL for linking to user profiles seed options are required when the "Crawl all OneDrive for Business Sites within an organization" option is enabled.

    Once clicked, your seed is configured to crawl OneDrive User Profiles. However, be sure to inspect the other settings on this configuration menu. The default settings must agree with your actual OneDrive site settings.

  6. Click OK/Apply