SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

One of the search features introduced with SharePoint 2010 was the concept of search refiners and this really gave power to the users to filter and work with search results. This capability was surfaced as the Refiner Panel in the search results pages and was driven by metadata values assigned to the content. The benefit of this was that users can work with large results sets and narrow down the search results based on meaningful business criteria.

Out of the box, the standard refiners were based on metadata generated directly by SharePoint and users were not able to configure these to their liking. The types of refiners that would typically be made available include Result Type (the type of file such as a Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel document), the Author of the piece of the document, the Modified data etc.

Whilst it was quite possible to add new refiners…