Using Confluence as a Directory

[Andrew Riley]

Hi There
We currently have an internal contacts list/directory that we use in Sharepoint. We have confluence installed and used by a large part of our organisation. I want to see if we can use confluence to replace this contacts list. Using the personal profiles is the obvious choice. The limitation that I have found however is that you cannot search via anything other than the name.

Scenarios
1. Staff don't know the name so search via title
2. Staff don't know the name or title by start with the department/team.

Is there anyway that we could get Confluence to do this? We want to shut down Sharepoint and potentially replace remaining parts we still use Sharepoint with Confluence. We also have Google Apps but you can only search via name or email address.

Thanks, Andrew

[Davin Studer · Accepted solution]

What we are doing in our org is that we purchased the User Profile Plugin. We are are pulling in extra data into Confluenc that he have already populated in Active Directory with this ... so that it can be searched on. The challenge is that the search syntax is not user friendly. So, we have created a Speakeasy extension that hides the searchbox on the people directory page and create a search form. When the user clicks the submit button on hits enter in the name or contact number field the values are gathered from the inserted form and placed into the hidden search field in the correct Confluence Lucene search syntax. Then the hidden search form is programatically submitted. It is working pretty well for us. The below image is what our's looks like with the original search field unhidden for debugging purposes.

This is what is actually placed into the original"hidden" search field.
-FirstName:(Admin*) AND -UserName:(svc*) AND -Department:(EX*) AND (FullName:(Davin*) OR FullName:(Davin)) AND (Extension:(xxxx*) OR Pager:(xxxx*) OR Mobile:(xxxx*)) AND Department:(Information Systems) AND Location:(COLUMBIA TECH)

[Andrew Riley]

Thanks Davin. Much appreciate your reply.