There are certain user accounts that you probably never want PeopleZen to show under any circumstances. You can filter these out "globally", ie. on the farm level or on the Site Collection level. This is done via the Exclude User Names configuration setting available via Site Settings / PeopleZen Studio / Configuration Settings, where you specify fully qualified domain account names to exclude, or describe a range of user names with *wild-card* patterns.
Select Edit Web Part from the PeopleZen Web Part menu and in the settings tool-pane, you will find the Filtering section:
A simple way to let end-users quickly filter by a given primary user profile field is the built in Quick-Filter Tabs feature. Simply select that field in the drop-down menu labeled Show tabs to quickly filter by. If you select the Department field, for example, PeopleZen provides tabs that correspond to the existing data values, and each tab shows only user profiles matching the implied filter:
This works well for user profile fields with a limited number of repeatedly used values, such as Department (where realistically between 3 and 20 values will exist), Skills, Past Projects, Manager etc. However, this feature has a neat way of also working well with fields of a potentially vast set of values, such as user names (up to as many values as user profiles may exist), phone numbers, birthdays etc. Beyond a certain threshold number of unique values (the default is 16), instead of providing each value as a separate tab, groups of values are subsumed under alphabetical, numerical or chronological index tabs:
To use quick-filter tabs, you need to pre-define a user profile field to filter by, but if you want end-users to change this interactively on-the-fly, simply tick the Allow interactive ad-hoc change of that field check-box option.
You will notice in the above screenshots that a tab simply labeled "—" may be shown at the end that shows all user profiles where the quick-filter tabs user profile field has no values at all. You can hide these people using the Always hide the [Empty] quick-filter tab configuration setting. You can also choose to show the PeopleZen Web Part initially-unfiltered by prepending to your quick-filter tabs a tab (to be selected-by-default) labeled (All), using the Always show the [All] quick-filter tab configuration setting.
Other options in the Filtering section:
You can further filter PeopleZen by a variety of methods:
All of these above use-cases, and many more, can be achieved by connecting PeopleZen to a filter provider Web Part. Select Edit Web Part from the PeopleZen Web Part menu and then from the same menu, in the Connections / Get Filters From sub-menu select a filter provider Web Part:
Depending on the filter provider Web Part, this may show a Configure Connection dialog (that you can also use to remove the connection if needed) where you can select the user profile field to filter by:
While PeopleZen supports all filter provider Web Parts built into SharePoint (including List Views and the built-in Filter Web Parts including the Choice Filter, Current User Filter, Date Filter, Page Field Filter, Query String (URL) Filter, SharePoint List Filter, SQL Server Analysis Services Filter and Text Filter), we highly recommend using a FilterZen Filter Web Part, which:
FilterZen lets you compose the most advanced search interfaces for PeopleZen: