How to Set Up the Refinement Panel in Employee Directory

The refinement panel in the Vitextra Employee Directory web part lets employees narrow the directory by the attributes that matter to your organization — department, job title, office location or any other profile property — in a couple of clicks. This article explains which web parts support the panel, how an administrator enables and configures it, and how end users work with it.

Which web parts support the refinement panel

The refinement panel is available in both directory web parts, but it gets its values from different places:

Enable the refinement panel

1. Open the SharePoint page that contains the web part and select Edit.
2. Select the web part and then select Edit web part (the pencil icon) to open the property pane.
3. Expand the Refinement Panel group.
4. Turn on the Enabled toggle.
5. Under Position, choose where the panel is displayed:
   • Left (default) — a vertical panel to the left of the results.
   • Top — a horizontal panel above the results; the values of each refiner are laid out in a row.
   • Right — a vertical panel to the right of the results.
6. Configure at least one refiner (see the next section). The panel is not displayed until it has refiners.
7. Republish the page.

The Position options are unavailable while the Enabled toggle is off.

Add and configure refiners

Refiners are managed in a separate editor. In the Refinement Panel group, under Refiners, select Configure. The Refiners panel opens with a table of the configured refiners and an empty row at the bottom for adding a new one.

To add a refiner:

1. In the empty row at the bottom of the table, fill in Refine by and Caption, and adjust the other settings if needed.
2. Select Add new item (the plus icon at the end of the row). The refiner is added to the table.
3. Repeat for each refiner you need.
4. Select Save to apply the changes, or Cancel to discard them.

Each refiner has the following settings:

To remove a refiner, select Delete Row (the trash can icon) at the end of its row, then select Save.

Use custom profile properties as refiners

This section applies to the Employee Directory web part with the User profiles data source.

With the User profiles source, the refinement values are calculated by SharePoint search, so Refine by must be the name of a managed property that is marked as Refinable in the search schema. A user profile property that is not mapped to a refinable managed property cannot be used as a refiner: SharePoint search does not return refinement values for it, and the refiner does not appear (or the search query is rejected).

To make a custom user profile property available as a refiner:

1. Make sure the property exists in the user profile service and has values for your employees. Each user profile property is crawled as a crawled property named People:<PropertyName>.
2. Open the SharePoint admin center and go to More features > Search > Open > Manage Search Schema.
3. On the Managed Properties tab, find an unused refinable property, for example RefinableString00, and open it for editing.
4. Under Mappings to crawled properties, add a mapping to the crawled property People:<PropertyName>.
5. Optionally, enter an alias (for example OfficeRegion) so the property is easier to recognize.
6. Save the managed property and wait until user profiles are crawled again. New mappings do not take effect immediately; it can take from several hours to a few days before the values appear in search.
7. In the Refiners editor, enter the managed property name (for example RefinableString00) in Refine by.

In Employee Directory (Entra ID) no search schema changes are needed: the refiner values are calculated from the data already loaded from Microsoft Graph. To refine by a custom Entra ID attribute, first add it as a custom attribute of the web part — see KB10060. How to Display Custom Entra ID Attributes in the Employee Directory Web Part — and then select it in Refine by.

Using the refinement panel

For employees, the refinement panel is a list of headings (the refiner captions) with the available values under each heading.

• Select a value to show only the employees who have that value. The selected value is highlighted, and the results update immediately.
• Combine refiners to narrow the results further. Values selected in different refiners are combined: for example, Department: Sales and Office: Riga show only the Sales employees in the Riga office.
• One value per refiner. Selecting another value in the same refiner replaces the previous selection; you cannot select two departments at once.
• Show more / Show fewer. When a refiner has more values than its configured maximum, select Show more to see all of them and Show fewer to collapse the list again.
• Counts. If the administrator turned on Show count, the number in parentheses next to each value is the number of matching employees.
• Clear your refiners. As soon as at least one value is selected, a Clear your refiners button appears at the bottom of the panel. Select it to remove all refinements and return to the unrefined results.

The two web parts differ slightly in how values behave:

How refiners work with search and quick filters

The refinement panel works together with the search box and the quick-filter bar:

• Search box. In Employee Directory (User profiles), refinements stay applied when you run a new search, so you can, for example, select Department: Sales and then search for a name within that department. In Employee Directory (Entra ID), typing in the search box resets the selected refiners and filters the full list again.
• My department. The refiners remain available and can be combined with the quick filter. Switching to another quick filter resets the selected refiners.
• My team, People I work with and Favorites. These quick filters work with their own short lists of people, so the refinement panel is hidden while one of them is active. It reappears when you return to the full directory or to My department.
• Reset. In Employee Directory, the Reset link clears the search text, the quick filter and the selected refiners at once.

Display notes and limitations

• Narrow layouts. The refinement panel is hidden when the web part is narrower than 641 pixels — for example, on phones or in a narrow page column. In a left or right position, the panel is 200 pixels wide (150–160 pixels on medium widths).
• Cards view. In Employee Directory (User profiles) with the cards layout, the panel is shown only while the search returns at least one employee.
• Empty refiners. A refiner with no values for the current results is not displayed.
• Duplicate refiners. In Employee Directory (User profiles), if the same managed property is added twice, only the first refiner is shown.