Remove Information from Search Results

Privacy is such an enormous deal, isn't it? I mean that in the conventional implication of the word "enormous," related to Enormity, which means, basically, Fabulously Wicked, or possessing of "the quality of passing all moral bounds; excessive wickedness or outrageousness" thank you DuckDuckGo/Wikipedia. All of those are slightly slippery words, too, as is the word "slippery" itself, conveying not particularly good nor bad but both all at once, or perhaps that's only to me.

Privacy concerns are pretty well paramount in any organization that has groups within it organized to share information via e-mail, because of course good naming conventions insist that such groups are clearly labelled, but to label them means - naturally! There can be discrimination, for or against, and this is especially important when money comes up. Money always comes up. Particularly in worlds where it's money versus prestige which may be termed "awesome" - although perhaps Awesome is a higher calling - well.

When pulling People Search results in Sharepoint, by default, it reveals your Active Directory Group Memberships. This is sometimes useful, as you can snarf who's actually doing things in your building as versus saying they're doing things out of their memberships; if they fail to possess access to all (x) departments, there's no formal way that a person could be commenting across an appropriately broad range of documents to be key to the organization.

As with all snarfing of information, however, there is a downside, and that downside is that your Active Directory can also reveal which of the labour organization groups any given member of a given team belongs to, and with that information comes an implied reveal of people's wages and or benefits package. As many managers are aware, a key source of employee discontent is unequal compensation, and that is bidness you can be sued over. Particularly in prestige jobs, and let us recall here that prestige is a lie, there is no truth in it but for the truth that can be converted to money and from there into a better life. No money, no better life, no matter how good the title.

So it is best, by and large, for your HR department to hide group memberships. It is the sort of information you need for communicating with groups, but revealing who is in or out of those groups is not the best idea. Similar to badly-labelled Twitter reading lists, it will eventually bite you right in your rear end.

Here is your technical fix for this pernicious and timely issue in the world of the minor capitalist.

1. Open your People Search page.
2. Site Actions - Edit This Page.
3. Click "Edit this webpart" on your people search return.
4. Under Display Properties, unticky Use Location Visualization.
5. Copy the Fetched Properties to a new text file.
1. Save this in your personal code folder as OriginalFetchedProperties.xml
6. Find the column marked "<Column Name="Memberships" HitHighLight="true"/>"
7. Set HitHighLight to False.
8. Copy the data back in, save your changes.
9. Publish your page.

Voila! Apparent equality and no visible membership to upsetting organization groups visible at all, ever. Now think about your upcoming contract negotiations, and whether, perhaps, living in Berlin might ever be viable.