Forum Discussion
Is a Modern SharePoint Search Center also on the Modern SharePoint roadmap?
Besides modern Team site publishing pages, new modern web parts, modern libraries and lists currently in preview and modern publishing sites planned for H1 calendar 2017 (see slide 21 of the SharePoint Publishing Roadmap), I haven't found any information regarding a modern SharePoint Search Center yet.
At the moment we are planning an upcoming project which requires a search center before summer 2017. So I'm curious: Is a modern SharePoint Search Center also planned to be released? If so, is it included with the modern Publishing Sites in H1 calendar 2017? Or is it planned to be released later?
They could definitely use a better advanced search functionality at the very least, and some algorithm tweaks. The #1 compliant from our users is that they can't find anything in search.
- Hehe...I hear this a lot as well, and not easily solved without:
* domain knowledge
* knowing the mental information model of employees
* knowing if content they are looking for is indexed
* aligning how people search with the content you have
* etc etc :)Most users don't want training and advanced techniques to find their content. They don't want to have to understand how it works. They want to type in the box and have it magically bring up their results, like Google does. Somehow Google narrows down millions of times more results and still comes up with better suggestions, so it's not unreasonable. A high standard, I know, but that is what people are used to. :/
- out of curiosity Harold, what features are you looking for? Are you looking to be able to customize the results, have best bets, etc? Or is there a basic set of features you just can't live without?! In some ways Delve is the new search center, presenting information based on graph data.
What I am looking for is a way to search seperately for both general content types and also for (company) specific content types. I want to be able to search through all these content types and being able to filter on a specific content type. I also want to be able to refine my search by selectable properties.
And I'm looking for a modern search center so it also follows the responsiveness, cross browser availability. Also it would be great when the search center can be styled easily, e.g. inherit the global Office 365 / specific SharePoint publishing styling, or it can more easily be styled than the current search center.
By content types I mean things like news, blogs, images, conversations, sites, groups, email and / or video's. By company specific content types I mean e.g. invoices, contracts, project sites, team sites, department sites.
At the moment we can create these search verticals by creating managed properties coming from indexed list items, documents or even site properties (using the property bag) and let the search query inside the search vertical only show these specific data.
When a user searches for "Lorem ipsum" he sees all information related to "Lorem ipsum", when he switches to conversations, he only sees the conversations with "lorem ipsum" mentioned in the text. Pressing the invoices tab presents him all invoices regarding the "Lorem ipsum" customer. And when I've send a lot of conversations I want to filter by "Conversation Date". I can imagine that I want to be able to refine invoices based on invoice date, customer, or invoice paid yes/no.
Yes Adam Levithan, I'm a heavy user of Delve too, and I like it regarding people search, searching for documents and discovery of trending content. But at the moment I can't retreive specifically invoices, contracts or project sites. I can only filter by Word-document, which is too generic in cases of our customers.
I know that Delve is based on the Microsoft Graph and I can create my own solutions targetting Microsoft Graph. But I'm curious which direction Microsoft is going:
- Will there become a modern SharePoint Search Center?
- Do we have to create a Search Center experience using the upcoming Modern Publishing features?
- Or do we have to create a custom solution to realize a specific search center experience? E.g. an Azure Web App which targets the Microsoft Graph and uses Office UI Fabric to make it look consistent with other Office 365 services?
Like Mikael Svenson mentioned also, we are debating which one is better.
But like Microsoft also mentioned with other services (e.g. Teams vs. Yammer), we need the power of choice. Our enterprise customers have different search requirements than our SMB customers, for some of them Delve is magnificent, for others it is too simplistic because it doesn't suit them. So we need them both in our toolset.
My understanding so far is that the SharePoint homepage is the successor to the old enterprise search center and that it will evolve. But we never know what will happen :) Seems that focus is to bring search out to the work context instead of centering it in one place.
I'm debating myself these days if one is better than the other, or if they should co-exist. I'm leaning towards searching in context.
