Highlighted content web part

[Juan M Baena]

Good Day

We have a use case were several communication sites where the site pages libraries leverage the same type of columns across these sites.  We are trying to leverage a web part that will surface site pages covering all of these sites based on a column/page property filter.

The highlighted content web part works perfectly on what we seek but only for the current site. As we change the scope from "The page library on this site"  to other sites or the sites that are part of the Hub site, we loose the filter "Page Properties.  Although we gain the ability to increase the scope to multiple sites or those associated with the Hub, its gets challenging to apply a filter based on a column/custom metadata.

We seem to have to options, once is to rely on a search query and the other one seems to reply on a managed property.  Not a search expert was trying some simple search queries involving the column and value but without success. Managed Property looks more complex approach if its works not sure.

Wish we had the filter for "Page Properties" when looking at more than 1 site.  If anyone has any ideas or feedback on how we could tap into a column value to filter out which pages across more than one site via the highlight content web part that will be great. Thank you

[#2 · Accepted solution]

I think you are on the right track. One way to do this is to use managed metadata for the values. You can create a term set at the root of the tenant and then in each site collection, create a column (type=managed metadata) that maps to the term set. Then, also at the root, map the local columns to an available existing managed property - RefinableStringxx. Once you do that, you can select the sites that you want to use in your roll-up and use a Highlighted Content web part to filter for RefinableStringxx contains [value]. A few things to note: you may need to wait for the search index to run for everything to sync up and you need to actually assign values to content in the individual sites before all of this will work. In other words, you can set it all up first but then you have to add content and assign the metadata for the index to pick everything up and the roll up to work. You can find more information about mapping columns in this article about managing the search schema.