YASR: User Account Look-Ups in SharePoint 2007

Sometimes a very small feature in SharePoint 2007 can mean a big relief for SharePoint users. Do you know the “pain” to add a user to a SharePoint site for example: you need to know the exact account name or the email address. One small typing mistakes will result in an unrecognized user. In the next version of SharePoint this scenario is drastically improved, and resembles a lot the experience that you get in Outlook.

First of all SharePoint will actually tell you if you have entered a correct user name. When the name is recognized it will get underlined just like in Outlook. You can trigger this recognition process by clicking the Check Names icon (left one) or you can use the Outlook shortcut CTRL+K.

That’s already nice, but what happens when you enter only a part of a user name can’t be recognized because more than one user names matches? You’re text will be underlined with a red line.

That’s not everything, if you click on the red line you will get a context menu that will allow you to select a user account from the list that’s recognized.

And if that’s not enough, you can also use the Browse icon to get a full blown people and group dialog box. This functionally is available for all the fields in SharePoint in which you need to enter a user name. Besides that you can also use this in your own lists and document libraries when you create a new column and use the column type Person or Group.