SharePoint Online: How to configure search to enable refiners on a lookup column

Question

I have a list of location names at the root of a site collection. I have a site column at the site collection level that is a lookup to the locations list. In sub sites I use the site column in document libraries. I created a custom search page to return results across all the libraries and I want to add the list of places as a refiner. Unfortunately, the dropdown for refiner on the managed property is grayed out.

I did find this note at TechNet:

"By default, lookup columns are not automatically promoted to search refiners; manual steps requiring a high level of user rights must be completed to enable this"

Anyone know what the steps are?

Note that I am limited to Site Collection admin.

Answer 1

You need to map the crawled property for the column to one of the existing RefinableString... managed properties.

This is due to a limitation in SharePoint Online where you can not mark additional managed properties as refinable (as you can do on prem)

Detailed instructions here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/sharepoint_made_easy/archive/2013/03/19/step-by-step-configuration-to-add-custom-refiners-in-the-refinement-panel-of-search-results-page-for-sharepoint-online.aspx

I think you need to have higher permissions than site collection administrator I'm afraid, since the mapping is done in the Office 365 settings section