This has been a common requirement so many customers that I worked for. Setting the global search page as the default landing page for specific users. I saw a similar question today in the Microsoft Dynamics forum as well and hence I decided to pen down on how I did it.
First things first – What is the URL for this global search page? Without this we cannot do anything. With fiddler, I just found the Url which is – /multientityquickfind/multientityquickfind.aspx. Offcourse this is a relative url which needs to be prepended by your organization name.
Now we have the URL. But how to set it for specific users? You can create a webresource to redirect to this page and then edit the sitemap to make it the default landing page. But then it affects all the users of your system. So what is the workaround.
Well below is the solution I implemented for many customers and they are very happy with that as well.
Step 1:
Create a dashboard. Select from the list of available templates but your final aim should be a dashboard with just a single section. Remove all other sections and increase the height and width of only one section to cover the page.
Step 2:
Create a HTML webresource. And add just the below code in the HTML webresource.
Here I am simply redirecting the page to load the global search filter page once the document load is complete. Offcourse you can do it your way but the final aim should be to load the global search page.
Step 3:
Insert the webresource in the dashboard and make sure ‘Restrict cross frame scripting” is unchecked. Check enable for tablet if your org has tablet support as well.
Step 4:
The final step is set the Dashboard as the default dashboard for specific users so that when they login, they can see this as the first thing to be loaded. You can ask the users to set it as the default dashboard once this is rolled out or you can use the ‘User settings editor’ from the wonderful XrmToolBox kit (http://xrmtoolbox.com)
And voila you are done. Next time when the user logs in, he can see the global search page loaded as default.
Hope this helps!