On January 22, 2020 we announced in advance that the Microsoft Search in Bing browser extension would be made available through Office 365 ProPlus on Windows devices starting at the end of February. Since then, we’ve heard from many customers who are excited about the value Microsoft Search provides through Bing and the simplicity of deploying that value through Office 365 ProPlus. With Microsoft Search integrated, Bing becomes a single search engine for users to find what they need - both from inside their organization and the public web.
But we’ve also heard concerns about the way we were planning to roll this value out. Most importantly, we heard that customers don't want Office 365 ProPlus to change search defaults without an opt-in, and they need a way to govern these changes on unmanaged devices.
Based on your feedback, we are making a few changes to our plan:
- The Microsoft Search in Bing browser extension will not be automatically deployed with Office 365 ProPlus.
- Through a new toggle in Microsoft 365 admin center, administrators will be able to opt in to deploy the browser extension to their organization through Office 365 ProPlus.
- In the near term, Office 365 ProPlus will only deploy the browser extension to AD-joined devices, even within organizations that have opted in. In the future we will add specific settings to govern the deployment of the extension to unmanaged devices.
- We will continue to provide end users who receive the extension with control over their search engine preference.
Due to these changes, the Microsoft Search in Bing extension will not ship with Version 2002 of Office 365 ProPlus. We will provide an updated timeline for this rollout over the next few weeks. For more detailed information about deploying Microsoft Search in Bing through Office 365 ProPlus, please refer to this support article. Learn more about rolling out Microsoft Search in Bing to your organization by reading this user adoption guide.
Thank you for your ongoing feedback. Please continue to share with us through UserVoice.
