Microsoft Graph Connectors enable you to connect external content sources (such as File shares, SaaS applications, CRM systems) into Microsoft Search, making all your enterprise content searchable in one place. By having all your content accessible in endpoints like SharePoint home, Office.com and Work@Bing.com, you reduce the overhead of context switching by keeping the information you need at your fingertips.
What’s new?
When you use Graph Connectors to add content sources, your users will be able to search for them in the All vertical by default. They can see the results from Graph Connector data sources merged inline with all the other results from Microsoft apps (for example, SharePoint, OneDrive for Business, or PowerBI) in SharePoint home and Office.com.
This is an improvement over the current result cluster experience, which is bound to a fixed place in the middle of the page and has a maximum of 2 results from a single custom vertical. With inline merging, Graph Connector results from all selected sources are seamlessly integrated into the search page and are ranked by their relevance to the search query.
Please find below a comparison of Graph Connectors in Result Cluster versus Inline results.
|
Feature |
Result cluster |
Inline results (NEW) |
|
No. of results in All vertical |
Max 2 |
No cap on number of results |
|
Availability of connector results on Pages 2 and beyond |
No |
Yes |
|
Default filter application (last modified, file type) |
No result cluster is shown on filter application |
Connector results can appear on filter application |
|
Requirement of custom vertical |
Yes |
No custom vertical required – a connection can be enabled for All vertical participation directly |
|
Deselecting a Graph Connector source from being shown in All vertical |
No |
Yes |
Admin controls
Search admins can control which connections are shown to the user in the All vertical. In the M365 admin center, a new panel for managing connection results in the All vertical has been added (Search & Intelligence > Customizations > Verticals > All > Manage connection results).
Limitations
Connector inline results experience is not available in Microsoft Search in Bing (MSB) and at SharePoint site search scope. Support for these surfaces is expected to follow by the end of 2023.
How does it work?
When a user issues a search query, the system returns items from all data sources that are enabled for the All vertical. The system ranks and merges these items to return a single list of relevance-ordered results which are shown to the user in a paginated list. Please note that inline results are powered by an AI model, that is non-deterministic. This means, the AI model will pay attention to the user query, previous interactions of users in a company with a specific source and many more features to decide which results are most relevant for the query. The model will be continuously adapted and adjusted based on user interactions, for example, by clicking on specific results.
As a result, a user may see none or many connector results based on the AI models assessment of whether specific items are relevant for each individual query term.
In this example, the query “Sahara project” shows results from Confluence, SharePoint, and ServiceNow to the user as there are relevant items with matching titles from these sources:
In this example, the query “Change security settings” shows results only from Confluence to the user as there are relevant matching items only in that source:
In this example, the query “Presentation templates” shows only results from SharePoint as there are no relevant matching items from any connector data source:
Recommendations
- You can contribute to ensure discovery of connector content by attributing the appropriate semantic labels for every connection. Semantic labels help the system identify shared properties such as title, last modified datetime, created by, etc. across different connections and use these features in ranking items for a given query.
- You should ensure that Graph connector search results do not interrupt the users’ habitual scanning patterns. Please review the adaptive cards, which determine the appearance and experience of the results in the search result list. For example,
- add an icon to your custom result types – it makes the source of the content transparent to users.
- verify that all results are correctly indented and are vertically aligned.
What’s next?
Inline merged results in Work tab @ Bing.com – coming soon in 2023
Microsoft
