picker "Not Equals" filter not working.

Good day Davidedpg10

I think you might have misunderstood how the "not equals" filter works. Based on your understanding you said that the the below filtering would "filter out anything that exactly matches IT ADMINS" but that is incorrect as the filter specified below will not filter out the exact matches to IT ADMINS but instead it will filter out everything that does not match IT ADMINS. 

For example:

If you have the below three rows...

ID=1  Name=A

ID=2  Name=B

ID=3  Name=C

And you apply the following filter on the picker populate rule...

Name "Not Equal" to B

This would display the below result as they are both not equal to B but Name (B) is eqaul to B therefore that one will get filtered out.

ID=1  Name=A

ID=3  Name=C

With the above said if you are trying to filter out everything that exactly matches to IT ADMINS, I would suggest changing the "Not Equal" to an "Equal" instead  so the filter condition would look like this ( PrimaryOU "=Equals" IT ADMINS )

You also mentioned that you were actually looking for a "Not Contains", with that kept in mind based on the above explained and the requirement you indicated I can see that you want to return all the rows that does not contain the words "IT ADMINS" and that does not match the words "IT ADMINS". To get that result you can simply change your filter to look like the below:

PrimaryOU "=Contains" IT ADMINS

For example:

If you have the below three rows...

ID=1 PrimaryOU=A_IT AMDINS

ID=2 PrimaryOU=B

ID=3 PrimaryOU=IT ADMINS

ID=4 PrimaryOU=D

And you apply the following filter on the picker populate rule...

PrimaryOU "=Contains" IT ADMINS

This would display the below result as they both either contain the direct words "IT ADMINS" OR they contain the words "IT ADMINS" rendering all the other items to be filtered out.

ID=1 PrimaryOU=A_IT AMDINS

ID=3 PrimaryOU=IT ADMINS

Should you feel that this post is of use and or an accurate solution to the raised question, I kindly encourage you to mark it as such using the 'Mark as Solution', 'Kudo' andor ‘Me Too’ options.

Kind Regards

Raymond

Thank you for that detailed response @RaymondJVR
I think my use of filters/filters out is adding confusion to this.
I would like to exclude things that exactly match "IT ADMINS" in the Primary OU

I made a test object and populated some simple entries.

the picker did not return the entry that contained IT ADMINS, which is the behavior I would like to see.
It does return the rest of them, which is meant to.
It does exhibit the desired behavior (of excluding the entries where primary OU is exactly "IT ADMINS") on a simple test object, but it does not exhibit the desired behavior when used on the "AD Service2" smartobject.