Forum Discussion
MC87299 - SharePoint Online SmartFilters Announcement
Hi MarcDAnderson,
I am Miceile, and am working on this feature and the rollout process. I apologize for the confusion and would like to clarify.
The goal of this feature is to help users discover relevant and useful content within their lists and document libraries. To access this feature, you will click the fliter icon located at the top right of your list or library.
Access SmartFilter
This will open the Smartfilter pane, where you can apply/remove filters on the list or library.
SmartFilter Pane
The help article will be ready to view within the next few hours. I will update this post and comment here again with the link asap.
Without restating everything that is in the help article, I do want to note a few things about this feature:
- The SmartFilter pane shown above fully integrates with the current method of column header filtering within lists and libraries (Current Filtering info).
- The filters a user will see in the SmartFilter pane are specific to the list/lib that is being viewed
- (For example: In the screen shot above, the "People" column is a required field for the list and is always within the users view; thus it is shown in the SmartFilter Pane. Within this "People" filter, the 4 users shown are the most frequently appearing names in the "People" column of the list and therefore are displayed first in the panel)
Thank you for your feedback Marc, I look forward to getting your opinions on the feature when you get access! Let me know if there is any other info I can give or any questions that I could help answer.
Best,
Miceile
Unless I'm filtering and scanning wrong, I don't see anything in the roadmap for this, but I *think* I know what it is. I'll see if I can get some product group folks to add clarity. The announcement in the Admin Center sure doesn't give us much to go on!
M.
cc: AdamHarmetz
- Miceile Barrett
Microsoft
Hi MarcDAnderson,
I am Miceile, and am working on this feature and the rollout process. I apologize for the confusion and would like to clarify.
The goal of this feature is to help users discover relevant and useful content within their lists and document libraries. To access this feature, you will click the fliter icon located at the top right of your list or library.
Access SmartFilter
This will open the Smartfilter pane, where you can apply/remove filters on the list or library.
SmartFilter Pane
The help article will be ready to view within the next few hours. I will update this post and comment here again with the link asap.
Without restating everything that is in the help article, I do want to note a few things about this feature:
- The SmartFilter pane shown above fully integrates with the current method of column header filtering within lists and libraries (Current Filtering info).
- The filters a user will see in the SmartFilter pane are specific to the list/lib that is being viewed
- (For example: In the screen shot above, the "People" column is a required field for the list and is always within the users view; thus it is shown in the SmartFilter Pane. Within this "People" filter, the 4 users shown are the most frequently appearing names in the "People" column of the list and therefore are displayed first in the panel)
Thank you for your feedback Marc, I look forward to getting your opinions on the feature when you get access! Let me know if there is any other info I can give or any questions that I could help answer.
Best,
Miceile
any updates on this rollout?
We don't have it yet in our first release tenant.
Thank you for the explanation, and also the Message Center has been updated with the article link.
One more questions, since the feature is not yet avialable: can you confirm, that the SmartFilter icon will be visible in "Thumbnail/Tiles" mode in document library/list? Currently the column headers are hidden in Tiles View (for obvious UX reasons), which makes implementing image based libraries with metadata filtering impossible at the moment (with the modern UI).
***EDIT***
Okay, I've just rechecked in a modern DocLib and there is an "Arrange" Button below the i (Information Pane) button, which unhides the columns again and enables manual column filtering. So I take the "impossible" back but stand by the UX reasons :)
- Thanks for the update Miceile!!
- Miceile Barrett
Hello MarcDAnderson Dean_Gross jcgonzalezmartin,
Here is the link to the help center post that I mentioned in my last post.
Best,
Miceile
- TomResing
MarcDAnderson, thanks for calling this out. I'm working on a help article that should put some more light on this. I thought this feature had been mentioned at ignite, maybe in a session by Kerem Yuceturk or Chris McNulty. It adds a new icon next to the info icon for lists and libraries and slides out an interactive pane, similar to the info pane. Where the info pane presents on item's metadata and allows interactive editing, the smart filter pane aggregates metadata from the current view. It allows interactive filtering of the list of items showing in the view.
Doing a presentation at Ignite is not a substitute for proper documentation. A few thousand people may have a seen a presentation, and the number of O365 Admins is many times more than that. It is imprerative that MS slow down the release of new features until the supporting documentation and adminisistrative controls are ready.
It is very difficult to explain how things work to my (and your) paying customers when I don't have anything reliable to read.
- Yeah, I also saw the message yesterday and I was trying to figure out what that feature does...and I still don't know :P
I haven't viewed all Ignite videos, but I don't remember anything about filters.
TomResing: when stuff like this shows up in the Admin Center with such a vague description (woudn't it be great if the description linked to an article?!?!), people make stuff up. I've already had two ping today about it with people guessing what it is. In both cases, they were wrong - at least I was pretty sure they were. It was hard to tell!
M.
