Author: Jonathan Stuckey
Enabling the Highlighted Content webpart to display content from other sites and hubs requires using managed properties and metadata.
This is a dreadful topic to figure-out if you are not an experienced SharePoint solution designer. Even then you really need to understand the how the search paradigm worked in classic SharePoint, or you don't stand a chance of making it work as expected.
Modern search
When Microsoft introduced the modern user-experience to SharePoint online a lot of the power of the classic platform was hidden, obscured or disabled. In recent years a lot of this hidden functionality is making a reappearance under a trimmings as "Modern" feature releases.
A key web-part the SharePoint modern UI is the Highlighted Content webpart.
There is a great little support article: Use the Highlighted content web part (microsoft.com), which starts off really easy going until about a 3rd of the way in when it drops the user in to depth of details administrative documentation and buried links.
The problem is that the only way to pull through content from another site, within the hub or not, is to either have everything published as a page (not practical) or spend time figuring out your required IA for your information needs and build that in to your crawled and mapped properties.
Basically you need to learn about SharePoint classic search platform.
Highlighted content vs. Search query web-part
Otherwise known as re-dressing the shop window. For those of you who've some experience with the classic SharePoint platform, you are probably intimately aware of the Content Search web-part and the Content Query web-part.
Suffice to say that these were / are extremely powerful, especially when coupled with well design information architecture for your solution - but a right pain the backside to get working if you are 'Joe-user' trying to setup a page.
You'll be relieved to hear I am not going to go on about these, or how to use them as classic is pretty much stone-dead if you are using Microsoft 365 platform, but I would like to draw the attention to the fact that the Highlighted Content webpart in modern is eerily familiar once you get past the pre-canned display options.
Basically, if you ever learnt about the KQL or using mapped properties (search schema metadata), then you are a shoe-in to get more from Highlighted Content webpart than you thought possible.
Taking the example above we can pull very specific content from a large-library of content on another site by referencing the location, and mapped property with a specific label:
RefinableString00:"Health" AND Path: https://organisation.sharepoint.com/sites/Resources/Policies/Ironically, if you've gone to the trouble of mapping your Information Architecture, and metadata so can be used in Search you don't need KQL for this. Just use the property as a filter:
Information design for search
If you are planning a modern SharePoint intranet on M365 for anything other than just news, which is every customer I've ever heard of, then you should pay attention to your IA the information design you need. Otherwise its going to be really hard to make your information flow automatically to the right place.
Microsoft makes some very big claims about the future, investments into Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) automagically discovering your information pulling it all together and presenting what you want, where you want - before you knew you wanted it.
Rubbish.
I've been working on tools which are driven by ML and AI solutions for some time, I have also had a crack at the Microsoft Viva toolset. While its come along significantly over the last couple of years, its a long way off of magically solving my business problems with information management and discovery.
Information architecture and solution design are still a requirement if you want a useable solution that your users will get value from. In the Microsoft 365 platform the core content repositories sit on:
Exchange,
SharePoint,
OneDrive (a.k.a. SharePoint), or
Azure.
So you need to figure out how to design solutions to maximise use of columns consistently for metadata (and content types - but that's another story). Why? Because...
Columns = metadata.
Metadata = information schema.
Schema = shows how users will search and find things.
So you absolutely need to understand how to get to and from query back to content by getting from crawled properties and managed properties:
Once available in format that can be used for refiner, we can then use the attribute in Search queries, or the Highlighted Content web-part.
Other articles
SharePoint - How to configure highlighted content webpart
About the author: Jonathan Stuckey
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