Staged rollout management for Graph connectors is generally available

Microsoft Graph Connectors allow you to index your organization's data sources in Microsoft Graph. They let you search all your enterprise content in one place and enable Copilot to reason over the full scope of your enterprise content. 

Using Microsoft Graph Connectors, you can index content from ServiceNow, Jira, Confluence, internal websites, on-prem file shares, Salesforce etc. To learn more, click here. 

Staged Rollout 

Are you looking for a way to test and validate Microsoft Graph Connectors in your production environment without affecting your entire organization? Do you want to get feedback from a subset of users before making your connections available to everyone? If so, you will be interested in the staged rollout functionality that’s now generally available for Microsoft Graph Connectors.

Staged Rollout feature allows you to gradually introduce Graph connectors to a select group of users in your production environment. You can use it to deploy an existing or new connection to a limited number of users, monitor performance, and adjust settings as needed. You can also expand or shrink the scope of the rollout at any time. When you're ready, you can end the staged rollout and deploy the connection to the entire organization (or to all applicable users).  

Staged Rollout settings will be applicable to all Search and Copilot experiences.

Data sources tab in Search and intelligence

 How to setup Staged Rollout 

1. Sign into the Search & intelligence portal. 
2. Navigate to the Data sources tab and select the connection you’d like to use for staged rollout. If you don't have a connection yet, you can create one by following the instructions here. 
3. In the connection setup, you’ll see a new button ‘Publish to limited users’ allowing you to deploy the connector to a limited audience.  

Review connection with option to stage

 4. Add the users or security groups who you’d like to give access to the connector. Currently, you can add up to 100 users and 15 M365 groups. Learn more about M365 groups here. 

Add staging to users and groups

5. After adding the list of users or groups for a given connection, click ‘Save’ to apply your changes. A confirmation screen lists the users and groups included in the deployment. 

Review connection with scoped rollout

6. Click on ‘Publish to limited users’ to complete the connection set-up. 

The portal will start the staged rollout process. Depending on the size of your organization and the number of users selected, this may take some time. You can check the status on the ‘Display all connections’ section under Data sources. Once the connection is published, only the users who are included in the rollout will be able to see the connector results in Microsoft Search and Microsoft 365 Copilot. 

Final thoughts 

Staged rollout is a powerful and flexible way to introduce Graph Connectors to your organization. It reduces the risk of disrupting your existing search experience and allows you to fine-tune your connector settings as you go.  

We are sure you will find this feature useful and valuable. We welcome your feedback and suggestions to improve it.