In that post, I explained the underhood mechanics of how to provide users with a more functional people search experience, but I left it up to the reader to apply that information to build a usable solution. Well, here's a solution you can use.
Recap of the Problem
MOSS provides you with a search box that has a scope called "People" which enables you to search user profile data:
Now, imagine the scenario where you are in a meeting, and you meet a guy for the first time and he introduces himself "Hi, I'm David Richarts" (or at least this is how you heard it...he did have a bit of an accent...hm.. oh well). After the meeting you need to find his contact info, so you trot on over your SharePoint intranet home page to use that People search feature, run your search, and what do you get?
Now what are you going to do? If you are the slightest bit saavy, you'll say to yourself "he could be listed as 'Dave' rather than 'David' and he could have been saying 'Richards' afterall... I'll just use this little Search Options do-dad and enter parts of his names!" (Aren't you clever! Many users don't even notice that link to the right of the search box.) So that's what you do:
And now what do you get?
At this point you have now confirmed what you've suspected all along - SharePoint search stinks!
But alas, it's not SharePoint search that stinks, it's just the user interface. If you read the original post linked at the beginning of this article you'll recognize that the problem here is that those partial names were enclosed in quotes by the Search Options UI. We can fix this!
Enter the People Search Content Editor Web Part. It's intended to be placed prominently on the home page of your intranet (and anywhere else where the above scenario of frustration might originate.) It looks like this, shown here with our partial names:
Hit enter or click the magnifying glass, and finally you've found Dave:
The code in the .dwp file is pretty straightforward. The only part you might need to tweak is the path to your people search results page, which is set in the code as '/SearchCenter/Pages/PeopleResults.aspx'