People working in large or remote work companies may sometimes struggle to find the right contact person within the organization or among a bunch of suppliers. Supporting both SharePoint User Profiles and SharePoint Custom Lists, the BindTuning People web part is a quick, simple way to find contact details for people users look for, independently of whether they are internal or external to your organization. Start communicating right away leveraging the Outlook and Microsoft Teams integrations and put a face to everyone’s names.
Solution Overview
- Option 1 - Filtering People withing a List
- Option 2 - Filtering Users from SharePoint User Profiles
Implementation
Option 1 - Filtering People withing a List
If your goal is to display contacts for a small set of people, then you can configure the People Web Part to use a list as a data source. You may use a list that is 100% custom to your needs and use:
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- BindTuning mapping capabilities to show which content from that list you want to see displayed in the web part layout.
- List views to show only a subset of users,
To configure a list as your data source, open the web part properties, and click on People Options » Manage Sources to open the modal and select List Results as your Source Option. Under "Filtering Options" define a previously created List View to show only a subset of users. 
Option 2 - Filtering Users from SharePoint User Profiles
If you want to create a corporate directory, that lists ALL employees; or if you would like to display people in separate pages, organized by department, or job title, you may want to avoid repetitive manual work of creating and updating SharePoint lists whenever someone joins or leaves the company, changes role or business area. By connecting BindTuning People Web Part to SharePoint User Profiles (People Options » Manage Sources » Search Results) you can leverage centrally managed information, filtering for who you want to see where. Maybe you just need to see the people from a specific department or job title; or maybe you want to filter out previous employees or service accounts. Depending on the criteria you are filtering for, you can either use:
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- Option 2.1 - Default filters
- Option 2.2 - Advanced Search
Option 2.1 - Default filters
If you are using BindTuning People default filters, you are given 3 options to filter for:
- Search Users from a Department
- Search Users from an Organization
- Search Users with a Job Title
In this case you will just need to add the user property result that you would like to filter for – see example below.
Tip! You need to know in advance the taxonomy being used to fill your SharePoint User Profiles.
Option 2.2 - Advanced Search
If you need to filter by a different user property than those 3, you can use Keyword Query Language to construct queries for Search in SharePoint. Read more on KQL Language at Keyword Query Language (KQL) syntax reference.
To use KQL with your BindTuning People Web Part, open the properties panel, click on Manage Sources » Search Results » “Advanced Search”- to see a different field open, with a code line added to it. That code is KQL language which allows us to filter users in a more granular way using:
- Additional properties from SharePoint User Profiles (article coming soon)
- More than one user property at the same time (article coming soon)
- Custom user properties (article coming soon)
Conclusion
In conclusion, you can filter your People Directory independently of which data source you are using (a List or the SharePoint User Profiles). If you have one site for each department and you want to show the people who work in that specific department, you can either create a list and use views to show only people from a specific department or you can connect to SharePoint User Profiles and use predefined filters or KQL to refine your search.
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