End users typically use People Search to find a subject matter expert (SME), a domain owner, or a point of contact (POC) for an issue. In the past, we relied on users  editing their My Site profiles to identify whether they were experts in an area. But, this is dependent on diligent profile management by all employees in the company. So, in this release, we focused on providing users with a default expertise search experience. What does that mean? We now use documents (Word, PowerPoint, and PDF) that are available to Search in SharePoint to identify document authors as experts. A document's author is identified as an expert on the content mentioned in the document. We also display in the hover panel some of the documents used in expertise search.

 

In the following image, the user searches for "packaging project" and sees a block of expertise results.

Name suggestions is one my favorite features this release. Using this feature, we've introduced a simple, easy, and intuitive way to find people by their names. "Word wheeling—typing a character(s) and seeing all the names starting with that character(s), is available on all names in the profile database, and therefore also in the People index. The feature supports exact name matches and also supports "fuzzy" matches. With fuzzy name matches, the spelling is similar but not exact because of phonetic misspellings or typing errors. (For example, see the second screen shot below.)