Azure Cognitive Search and Microsoft Search in O365

[ThomasVetter]

Can Azure Cognitive Search also be used as an extension for the Microsoft O365 search, or is it fully separated, meaning no direct integration planned or in scope?
 

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Hi Thomas, last week we introduced the SharePoint indexer for Azure Cognitive Search (https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/search/search-howto-index-sharepoint-online) that allows you to easily ingest content to make it searchable. In addition, we find that customers will often want to have cognitive search integrated into O365 and Power Apps are a great way to do this (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search/search-howto-powerapps). We continue to look at other integration points with the O365 team such as federated search.

[#3]

Regarding federation, what would you recommend for pulling data from SOLR and on-premise file systems?

[#4]

In Azure Cognitive Search, we have a PUSH api (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/searchservice/addupdate-or-delete-documents) that allows you to programatically upload content to the Cognitive Search service. This would allow you to create a system to take SOLR data and push it into the Search index. Another option, which likely would be easier is to to extract the SOLR data into a set of JSON documents, and place them in a location such as Azure Blob Storage and let our Indexer (think of it as like a crawler), ingest this JSON data into the search service (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search/search-blob-storage-integration).