Many people have expressed excitement over the new Silverlight web part known as the Organization Browser in SharePoint Server 2010. The web part uses the Manager field from SharePoint’s User Profiles to build an organizational hierarchy. The organization browser is interactive, in that you can navigate up and down the hierarchy, as well as, left to right to see the colleagues that share your manager. The web part is natively displayed on each user’s My Profile site under the Organization tab. The screenshot below shows the Organization Browser as it exists out-of-the-box on My Profile:
Some have liked the new web part so much that they have decided to add the web part to their main Portal web application, making it easier for users to see the corporate organization chart. The web part is available and functions as expected IF your Portal and My Sites are on the same web application. However, having the Portal and My Sites in the same web application is not a best practice approach, and many create their environments separating the two out. In this scenario, when the Admin user adds the Organization Browser (under the Social Collaboration category) on a page in the Portal web application, the web part adds properly but displays nothing as shown below:
In order for the web part to properly function on another web application, you have to add a clientaccesspolicy.xml file to the root of the IIS virtual directory for the Portal and My Sites web applications. To adhere to security best practices, you want to limit this policy to only allow access to your Portal web application and not any others.
Creating the clientaccesspolicy.xml
-
Copy the below into Notepad, edit the “https://portal.contoso.com” to match your environment, and then save it as clientaccesspolicy.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<access-policy>
<cross-domain-access>
<policy>
<allow-from http-request-headers="*">
<domain uri="https://portal.contoso.com" />
</allow-from>
<grant-to>
<resource path="/" include-subpaths="true"/>
</grant-to>
</policy>
</cross-domain-access>
</access-policy>
- Put the file into the root of both the Portal and My Sites IIS virtual directories. The IIS web sites are typically located in C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories.
Refresh your site and the Organization Browser should now load successfully!
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Hello Adam,
I’m having problems with this technique..
my mysite: personal.domain.com
portal: intranet.domain.com
i’ve added the clientaccesspolicy to bolth webapplications but the organization browser won’t load. any suggestions ?
Hello Adam, I tested this in our Test Farm with Classic authentication and it worked fine. I then tried it in Production Farm with Claims Based authentication and it didn’t. Microsoft is saying that the Organization Browser will not work across web apps using Claims. Have you tried it with Claims?
@Scott
No, I have not tried it with Claims Auth, sorry. Thanks for pointing out the limitation though!
Hi Adam,
do you know a easy way in which the Organsiation-Browser can be customized? I would like to also see the email address and the phone number in the Silverlight View.
Thanks Marco
There is no clean easy way that I have found thus far. The fields shown on the web part are what you see plus the About Me field. What I have seen accomplished is through code setting whatever additional fields you want shown on the web part as the About Me field. This will display the additional fields on the Org Browser, but would of course set the users About Me field to include duplicate information. It is a give-and-take approach for sure…
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Adam – Great post! Thanks for sharing this little tip.
Have you tried to get it to default to particular individual, like it does in the my site web app when you click on a user? Instead, it always defaults to the user browsing there. I even tried adding the query in the URL and it didn’t work. Any ideas?
Update: This workaround is no longer need with the installation of Service Pack 1 for SharePoint Server 2010. If you have SP1 installed, you can simply add the web part to any web application and it work as expected!
That’s strange. We installed 2010 SP1 but still don’t see the organization web part.
Hello Adam,
nice post!
It works everything fine, but we have a special need! We want a static view of one specific person. Even if someone else is logged in, we want that he sees the organization view of another person. Do you maybe know a solution?
Greetz Roy
Yes, check out my last post: Start the Organization Browser from any Account Name
http://www.tcscblog.com/2011/07/29/start-the-organization-browser-at-any-account-name/
Hi Adam,
It’s very nice post…
I am facing an issue with Organization browser. I have uploaded my Profile picture to my site. It is showing properly when i access it with in the server, when i access it from the my desktop then it is not showing the profile picture in it.
ex:
From the server.
http://computername/mysite/OrganizationView.aspx?accountname=mydomain/xyz
From my desktop.
http://mydomain.com/mysite/OrganizationView.aspx?accountname=mydomain/xyz
Any solution?
Thanks in advance
-Shiva
Hi Adam,
Great Post thanks allot
I’m trying to use org chart web part using a specific user.
But for some reason I’m getting an error
As soon as i add the line (in the designer (
I’m getting this error :
Unknown server tag ‘SPSWC:ProfilePropertyLoader’
any ideias ?
You need to add the right references at the top of the page, check out my post on how to do this:
http://www.tcscblog.com/2011/07/29/start-the-organization-browser-at-any-account-name/
Does anyone have any recommendations for a Web Part to display a ‘Family Tree’ view of an organisation (including pictures). It needs to be based on the User Profile service so any changes to MySites are picked up.
I have already used ContentAnd Code’s 1OrgChart but it has limitations and they are no longer developing updates to it.
thanks
Tony
Hi,
If you haven’t installed SP1 you can force the Web Part to show the HTML view rather than the “broken” silver light view. The setting is buried at the bottom of the Web part settings under “Default Values”. This are is below the “Advanced” area… not sure why it got pushed to the bottom, but it’s there.
Hello Adam,
I’m having problems with this..
my mysite: http://mysite
portal: http://intranet
SP2010, SP1, October CU, no AAM
i’ve added the clientaccesspolicy to bolth webapplications but the organization browser won’t load.
Any solution?
Thanks in advance
Karel
My package:
This post is for SP2010 prior to Service Pack 1. The issue of not being able to use the web part in another web app was resolved with SP1. So, if you have that level installed then you should be able to simply add it to a page just like any other web part without the clientaccesspolicy file.
My package:
Hi,
Thanks for wonderful information.
we would like to show the additional information of the users like(Phone,Ext,Location,etc), could you please let me know that, how we can customize this Organizational Chart accordingly.
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Hi Adam,
Thank you for the post, it is very useful.
I found another interesting problem, the organizational browser silverlight view won’t work if I add a content query webpart to the page. Any thought on this issue?
Thank you.
Alex
Hi!
You need to set PlayMediaInBrowser=”false” for all content query webpart on page.
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Hi!
I found how fix Alex problem. You need to set PlayMediaInBrowser=”false” for all content query webpart on page.