Hide users from the Atlas People Directory

Most Microsoft 365 environments will include a number of Service Accounts, Test Users or other accounts which you want to hide from the Atlas People Directory. In this article we explain how a SharePoint Administrator can hide specific users from the Atlas People Directory.

Please note that these methods do not hide users from Microsoft Search, only from the Atlas People Listing.

In this article:

• Hide users by setting their profile property
• Hide users by directly filtering the In Focus query
  • Filter out specific AD property values
  • Filter based on empty fields
• Still need help?

Hide users by setting their profile property

1. First go to the Microsoft 365 admin centre, then open the SharePoint admin centre from the left hand menu:
   
2. In the SharePoint admin centre, on the left again, click More features:
   
3. Open the User Profiles section:
   
4. Click Manage User Profiles:
   
5. Now search for the user you want to hide, and click Edit My Profile from the dropdown:
   
6. If you scroll all the way to the bottom of the profile (there are a lot of fields!) you should see this setting - Hide profile from Atlas People Directory:
   
7. Tick the checkbox to turn the setting on, then in the far bottom right of the page make sure you click Save and close:
   
8. After about 5-10 minutes that profile should no longer appear in the People directory.

Hide users by directly filtering the In Focus query

If it is not realistic to filter out individual profiles by setting the property above, then you could consider a couple of alternatives explained below.

Please note that these changes will need to be applied to the People Directory page in every workspace in the system if you are using the default Search configuration.

Filter out specific AD property values

If your non-user accounts have specific values, such as setting the Job Title as "Service Account", you can simply ask the query to remove those profiles. If we take this specific example we can write the KQL to filter out any user with the Job Title as "Service Account":

-RefinableString131:"Service Account"

Filter based on empty fields

Another option is to filter users out of the query using certain AD Properties that may allow you to determine if an account refers to a real user, for example if only real users have a Job Title or Department where other accounts do not, we could filter the query to only return users where that field is populated in their profile. This requires that you can identify a property in AD where non-user accounts do not have a value populated.

If you add the following KQL to the Query in the In Focus web part returning People, you can filter out profiles where a specific property is empty. For example, using the People:Department property which uses the RefinableString139 Managed Property:

(RefinableString139:a* OR RefinableString139:b* OR RefinableString139:c* OR 
RefinableString139:d* OR RefinableString139:e* OR RefinableString139:f* OR 
RefinableString139:g* OR RefinableString139:h* OR RefinableString139:i* OR 
RefinableString139:j* OR RefinableString139:k* OR RefinableString139:l* OR 
RefinableString139:m* OR RefinableString139:n* OR RefinableString139:o* OR 
RefinableString139:p* OR RefinableString139:q* OR RefinableString139:r* OR 
RefinableString139:s* OR RefinableString139:t* OR RefinableString139:u* OR 
RefinableString139:v* OR RefinableString139:w* OR RefinableString139:x* OR 
RefinableString139:y* OR RefinableString139:z* OR RefinableString139:1* OR 
RefinableString139:2* OR RefinableString139:3* OR RefinableString139:4* OR 
RefinableString139:5* OR RefinableString139:6* OR RefinableString139:7* OR 
RefinableString139:8* OR RefinableString139:9* OR RefinableString139:0*)

This ensures that this field has some value (the field begins with a letter or number) and therefore is not empty, as there is no way to easy just check if a property is null in KQL.

Still need help?

If you still need assistance with any of the above please contact support or your CSM.