Index metadata from a "Person or Group" column

This is for:

Developer System Administrator

When a SharePoint Online list contains a column of type Person or Group, the SharePoint Online source extracts two pieces of metadata for the users specified in the list items:

  • The value displayed in the SharePoint Online column

  • The user’s email address

For example, consider a SharePoint Online list with an Assignee column of type Person or Group. The Assignee column displays the value of the Name field, which shows the user’s first and last name. If you index this list, Coveo’s View and map metadata subpage will display values extracted as Assignee and Assignee_email metadata, as shown on the right below.

Assignee column in SharePoint Online list Source crawled metadata

SharePoint Online list showing a Person or Group column

Metadata crawled from the SharePoint Online list

If you want to extract only the assignees' first names, you need to change the field displayed in the SharePoint Online list column to First name.

SharePoint Online column showing the user first name | Coveo

The field value displayed in the SharePoint Online column is determined by the Show field option in the list settings.

To display another field in the SharePoint Online list Assignee column

  1. In your SharePoint Online site left menu, select the list, and then click Settings > List settings.

  2. In the Columns section, click Assignee.

  3. In the Show field dropdown menu, select the desired SharePoint field, and then click OK. For example, you could select First name.

  4. Reindex your SharePoint Online site.

  5. Rebuild your SharePoint Online source.

  6. On the Sources (platform-ca | platform-eu | platform-au) page, click your SharePoint Online source, and then click More > View and map metadata.

  7. You’ll now see that the value extracted for the Assignee metadata corresponds to the one selected in the Show field dropdown menu.

    New value for the Assignee metadata | Coveo

  8. If you haven’t already, index the Assignee and Assignee_email metadata by mapping them to fields. For example, if you selected First name in the Show field dropdown menu, you could create a user_first_name field for the Assignee metadata and a user_email field for the Assignee_email metadata, respectively.

  9. Rebuild your SharePoint Online source.

  10. In the Content Browser (platform-ca | platform-eu | platform-au), confirm that the fields for your SharePoint Online list item are populated correctly.

    Items in the Content Browser | Coveo