My Title Is Wrong In People Search: Active Directory and MySite

Here is the first of many common problems you will encounter while administering front-end sharepoint 2010 on an enterprise level.

Your title is wrong, and Lindsay Koffler-McMichael has not worked here for six months, yet when you search the Staff Directory, there they are. They are right there. With the wrong phone extension.

Someone has noticed this, perhaps someone with the title that Lindsay Koffler-McMichael used to hold. Perhaps it is a high title, with much prestige. This mostly means a lot of work for the new person, Rebecca Holmes-Angell, and since what she gets in return for the work is the title, she is now very unhappy with someone. Probably you.

prestige (n.)1650s, "trick," from Fr. prestige (16c.) "deceit, imposture, illusion" (in Modern French, "illusion, magic, glamor"), from L. praestigium "delusion, illusion" (see prestigious). Derogatory until 19c.; sense of "dazzling influence" first applied 1815, to Napoleon.

From EtymologyOnline.  

The phone calls will come, but you cannot fix this. Cue existential dismay.

Sharepoint draws its permissioning, groups, and account system from Active Directory. AD is a great system, which, well-maintained, is a major selling point for having a Microsoft ecosystem. One login! Fantastic! Except....

The Active Directory is maintained outside of Sharepoint. Presumably, it is maintained by someone else, someone in HR or in IT who sets use permissions and grouping and inheritance for the entire organization. That someone else is likely not you. You are okay with this, because it would mean having to do really intense data-entry maybe all the time, and you would also have to be keeping track of the e-mail system and whatever else is calling Active Directory. You do not want maintenance of Active Directory to be your job. You would then have to know who is being hired, fired, and retitled on a constant basis. In firms where titling is a matter of life-and-death prestige*, this is very close to being a definition of actual Hell.
*Derogatory until 19c. Still a trick.

Therefore, you cannot change the results handed back by the Staff Search. You can merely style them. If you are REALLY into this, what you will need to do is build a jQuery scrape and hide it in the search page, at which point it can be used to disguise key, name-based results, and possibly correct titles.

Do you really want to have your own, hacked, slow-loading, front-end return system that uses "$(.hide())" and "$(.replace())" to painstakingly re-do data entry work?

You do not want to do that. You have websites to read.

Direct your contact to HR, with an apology note, and perhaps some sad kitten clipart.

Sorry, sorry, terribly sorry.