Forum Discussion
Policy needed: "Go to an intranet site for a one-word entry in the Address bar"
Thank you, ToMMeR, stesch79 and paf_skov for your feedback. I can appreciate those circumstances and your request.
We will look into adding a policy to make single-word queries navigate and I'll follow up on this thread with an update as soon as I have one.
Thanks again for giving us this important feedback and for describing your specific scenarios! It helps!Jared
MicrosoftToMMeR thank you for your feedback!
You are correct that Edge will perform a search on the single-word entry that omits the https:// prefix the first time, however once the user visits the intranet site, subsequent entries of the same text will auto-complete to the history entry and therefore perform a direct navigation to the intranet site.
I do hear your request for a policy to allow organizations to override the behavior I described and we are happy to consider that approach, however one thing that's important to note is that it will make it much more difficult for non-intranet, single-word query terms to be searched by users of any organization that enables such a policy should it be implemented.
Instead of conducting a search, all single-word queries would attempt to internally navigate and so any queries that don't match an intranet site would fail instead of search.
Please let us know if the current behavior which I described (relying on history entries for direct navigation to intranet sites), is sufficient for you, or if a policy is still important to you.
Thanks again for your feedback!
Jared
JaredB81 Thank you for your quick reply.
Although the auto-complete from the history navigating to the intranet site is a nice feature, it is not sufficient to satisfy our needs.
It is a big inconvenience if thousands of users have to learn to type in http://hostname or https://hostname the first time they visit each of the many intranet sites we have in our organisation.
It will cause many support cases to our service desk as our users does not understand why it doesn't work. Of course over time as the users visit each intranet site the problem decreases. But that is only until they get their pc reinstalled, get a new pc, get their history deleted etc. plus everytime we implement a new intranet site with a new hostname they have to do it all over for that website.
We have tried to get our users to use the current Edge version instead of IE on their pc's but many still use IE as their default simply because they get irritated that they cannot access our intranet sites without ending on Bing or Google.
We still need a Group Policy like the one that existed in Internet Explorer where we can choose if we want single word entries to go to intranet sites instead of doing a search.
In IE when typing a single word that does not resolve internally it does still fall back to a Bing/Google search, it just takes longer as it waits for the intranet request to time out before doing a Search.
JaredB81 We also look forward for such a policy. Your suggestion is not suffiecient in our environment, as we delete all browser history on browser close, due to security reasons. Our users are anyway not allowed to use the Edge address bar for internet search.
But, it would be great to have the same behaviour as in MSIE. If the URL can be resolved internally, it forwards to intranet. If not, then a search engine shall be addressed.
JaredB81- As the new Edge will replace and emulate IE for enterprises, it must respect the same GPO settings, including this one. Many enterprises use single-word names, for example, "intra" in our case.
Because it falls back to sending the word to the search engine if no host replies, it is not a problem, and something users have been used to for decades.
Peter 🙂
