From Finding Content to Managing It: My Recent Contributions to PnP Modern Search

One of the reasons I keep contributing to PnP Modern Search is simple: almost every feature request, bug report, or enhancement starts with a real-world customer scenario.

Over the last few months, I've had the opportunity to contribute several improvements to the develop branch, ranging from Microsoft Search integration and metadata management to refiners and search scalability. While none of these changes are revolutionary on their own, they all address challenges I've encountered when building enterprise search solutions.

Search Shouldn't Require a Degree in Microsoft Search Schema

One of the larger contributions was around Microsoft Search schema discovery and field normalization. Anyone who has worked with Microsoft Search knows that understanding available properties and mapping fields correctly can sometimes be more difficult than building the actual search experience.

The goal of this work was to make field discovery easier and provide a more consistent experience across SharePoint-backed entities and external items. I also aligned date filtering with Microsoft Graph field names to reduce confusion and improve predictability when configuring search solutions.

For administrators and solution builders, this means spending less time figuring out which fields are available and more time focusing on the search experience itself.

Be advised that field discovery does require an additional delegated Graph Permission, ExternalConnection.Read.All , but only for External data.

Making MS Search just as easy to use in Modern Search as SharePoint Search is a huge task, but we are getting closer, one PR at the time.

Search Is No Longer Just for Finding Things

One of my favourite contributions was adding support for the Details action across the built-in result layouts.

Most search solutions stop once the user has found the right content. But in many Information Architecture, compliance, and governance projects, finding the content is only half the job. The next step is often correcting, enriching, or maintaining its metadata.

With the Details action, users can update metadata directly from the search results instead of navigating to each individual document or list item. For bulk maintenance scenarios, the functionality also works in multi-select mode, allowing updates to be applied across multiple items in a single operation.

For organizations working with document classification, retention, records management, or information quality initiatives, this transforms search from a passive discovery tool into an active metadata management tool.

And honestly, that's a capability I've wanted to see available out of the box for a long time, and it is heavily inspired by the PnP Modern Search Extension that Dan Toft made for a session we did together at ECS and Collabdays Hamburg, link

Looking Beyond the 1,000 Item Refiner Ceiling

Another topic I've been exploring is the well-known 1,000-item limit in refiners.

For many scenarios this limitation is perfectly reasonable, but I've seen several enterprise environments where the number of managed terms, business classifications, or metadata values can grow well beyond that threshold.

The challenge is balancing performance with usability. Simply returning thousands of values isn't necessarily a great user experience either.

I don't have all the answers yet, but for People fields this can partly solve the issue:

Helping Large Tenants Navigate Massive People Directories

Another contribution focused on the Static Person layout, a layout designed specifically for people-centric search experiences. In large tenants, it's not unusual to have tens of thousands of users, making traditional people refiners difficult to use and often constrained by the well-known 1,000-item refiner limit.

The Static Person layout offers a different approach. Instead of forcing users to browse huge refiner value lists, it allows organizations to create curated people experiences that surface relevant individuals directly in the search results.

It doesn't completely eliminate the underlying limitation, but it provides a practical alternative for large organizations where finding the right person through a refiner is becoming increasingly difficult. Sometimes the best solution isn't raising a platform limit. It's providing a better user experience altogether.

Why I Keep Contributing

Every contribution starts with a customer challenge, a community discussion, or something I encounter while implementing solutions myself.

What I love about PnP Modern Search is that it continues to evolve based on real-world requirements. Whether it's improving Microsoft Search integration, making metadata maintenance easier, fixing edge cases in refiners, or pushing the platform beyond current limitations, every improvement helps someone build a better search experience.

And that's ultimately why I contribute.

Not because I enjoy writing pull requests (although sometimes I do), but because every enhancement removes a little friction for the next person trying to solve the same problem.

PS. these features are in the Dev branch, and will properly be part of a release in mid or late August 2026