Overview

Sometimes when you search for a person in your Jive community, the search results produced may not be as expected, @mentions may not work as expected, the most appropriate match may not be listed at the top, or inactive users might appear in results.  This article provides assistance with fixing people search issues.

Environment 

• Jive Cloud AWS
• Jive Hosted
• Jive On-Premise

Diagnosis

This problem may manifest in a number of ways, and affects both spotlight and advanced search.

• Inconsistent results - a search now may show different results than it did a period of time ago
• No results - a search may show no matches for the person you are looking for at all
• @mentions - not consistently finding the person, or unable to find them at all

Solution

The fix to this issue varies depending on the root cause. Below are some possible solutions:

• Check the Jive Software Status page
• Check the Jive User Account is active
• Check the user account name is spelled correctly
• Check for incorrectly populated fields in the user profile
• Rebuild the user search index

Check the Jive Software Status page

Check the Jive Software status page to see if there is a known issue that may be affecting search performance.

Check that the Jive User Account is activated

Inactive users can be seen in Advanced Search results (can be toggled on/off), but the user account must be active in order for it to appear in spotlight search or @mention. To check this, follow these steps:

• Open the Jive Admin Console
• If the Advanced Admin Console is not yet open, click the link to Advanced Settings (lower left)
• Click the People tab
• Search for the user in the field at the top to narrow the list of users
• If the user is highlighted in red, then the account is disabled
• To re-enable the account, click the icon in the deactivate column

  

Check if the user account name is spelled correctly

Any irregularities with @mentions or searches for a particular person could be due to a recent change in the spelling of their name, or a spelling error in the search itself.

For example, if your search is for Annie Wilkes, but her name is spelt with an apostrophe in her Jive profile, the search will fail to find her personal page until you correct the spelling.

Check for invalid properties in the user profile

A user account will fail to be added to the User Search Index if incorrectly formatted data is found in any of the user profile property fields.

To resolve this,  conduct a review of the user profile:

1. Open the Jive Admin Console
2. Click People, then open the related user profile
3. Review the property fields for errors, especially date fields such as Hire Date
4. Correct as needed, then rebuild the user search index

To resolve invalid Active Directory data:

1. Check the user profile in active directory and especially review date fields or any custom fields
2. Check for any invalid data or incorrect formatting
3. If there is an error, then correct the data

Rebuild or Update the User Search Index

As a last resort, you may need to update or rebuild the user search index.  This is a resource-intensive procedure, and should only be conducted during a time when it will have the least impact on your user community.