The PeopleZen User Profiles Web Part offers you an incredibly easy way to list richly formatted links to user profiles inside your SharePoint environment, include relevant meta data you choose, filter based on date properties, and display profile pictures too.

After successfully completed solution installation and feature activation, simply place the Web Part onto any SharePoint Page in the usual way and, depending on the user profiles already set up in your server farm, you will see something like the following:

To customize the PeopleZen User Profiles Web Part, simply select Modify Web Part from the Web Part edit menu. In the current release, you can customize for any given individual Web Part the following settings. (PeopleZen also exposes additional configuration settings on the server farm or Site Collection level.)

Display Style

PeopleZen currently supports two view modes.

• The default view mode, illustrated above, is called Tiles. It arranges user profiles next to each other, and optionally into multiple rows each containing a given maximum number (2 by default) of user profiles.
• The second view mode, illustrated below, is called List View. It resembles the look and feel of the out-of-the-box SharePoint Document Library and List View tables:

Paging

Simply specify the maximum number of user profiles to show at once, or specify 0 to always show all user profiles in the Web Part. Users can click Next and Previous links inside the Web Part to "page through" all user profiles.

Filtering

You can limit the user profiles to be displayed based on any user profile properties, for example to create Web Parts such as New Employees or Upcoming Colleague Birthdays. To apply filters to the PeopleZen User Profiles Web Part, download and install the FilterZen Filter Web Part from http://roxority.com/FilterZen-Download. The FilterZen Filter Web Part offers self-explanatory user interfaces and comes with extensive documentation on its own. Read the next section below to learn about the full list of valid user profile property names.

See our online blog article An "Upcoming Birthdays" Web Part in 10 minutes for a tutorial on how to apply filters.

Profile Properties & Sorting

The PeopleZen User Profiles Web Part always displays both the user profile picture and the name of the user. You can specify additional profile properties to be displayed per user, as demonstrated in the screen shot below. Each property is given by its internal name and a title you can choose yourself, both separated from each other by a colon character [:].

• If you omit the display name, the property will be hidden, ie. not be included (but you can still sort by it).
• If you give a property the special display name ___ (3 underscores), only the property value will be shown, but never the property (or column) name.

To sort the listing of user profiles by one of your included properties, prefix the property line with a plus (+) character for ascending order, or with a minus (-) character for descending order.

To see which user profile properties are in active use (and which may or may not have been pre-populated during Active Directory user profile imports), open the Home page of the Shared Service Provider used in your SharePoint farm (you can access that page from Central Administration), and underneath the User Profiles and My Sites section, click the User profiles and properties link. At the bottom of the User Profiles and Properties page, click the View profile properties link to see the full list of active user profile properties in your SharePoint environment.

To use one of those properties in your PeopleZen User Profiles Web Part, click its Property Name and in the menu that now shows, click Edit. On the next page, the first text box (it will usually be disabled) indicates the internal profile property name that you will need to use in the Profile Properties section of the PeopleZen Web Part Settings, just before the colon and a property display name of your choosing.