Microsoft has just announced that the Taxonomy Refinement Panel Web Part will now be available on SharePoint Online. This web part has been available in the on premise version of SharePoint 2013 but not available online until now.
The Taxonomy Refinement Panel Web Part (TRPWP) is similar in both name and functionality to the Refinement Web Part (RWP). With the RWP, visitors can filter content that’s displayed on a page; for example, they can filter to display only items that have the color red. The Taxonomy Refinement Panel Web Part also allows visitors to filter content that’s displayed on a page. But the TRPWP differs from the RWP in two ways: the filters it uses are the categories from the site’s navigation, and it can display category-specific editorial content.
The TRPWP is particularly designed for those intranets that are using managed navigation and category pages. The TRPWP enables the experience of filtering search results and editorial content based on the managed navigation terms.
In addition, Microsoft has now enabled faceted navigation in SharePoint Online which provides the ability to have a single page that has different filters depending which category is being displayed. In this example, the filters for the Laptops page is different than the filters for the Printers page.
These sites are only available for intranet use – despite the sample pictures showing an e-commerce site, you cannot deploy these features to a public web site. In addition, you need the Enterprise E3 or E4 subscription to have these features available.
