Find your free time with Microsoft Search
Published Dec 04 2019 12:32 PM 27.2K Views
Microsoft

Kick start 2020 by finding your free time with Microsoft Search…

 

It’s been a busy year for Microsoft Search, here’s the 2019 recap from Microsoft Search and the year ahead…

 

When you need to find something to get work done, what do you do? If you’re like many people, you look through your personal files or company intranet to find what you need. If you don’t know or remember enough about the document you need, your search experience can be difficult and time consuming. The time you put into searching could instead be used to complete your current task. Search shouldn’t hold you back, but rather propel you forward to do more in less time.  Let’s face it…a big part of our daily lives is spent searching for things – whether it’s looking for our car keys or trying to find that presentation someone shared with us last week. 

 

In the past, finding things meant retracing your steps, what room was I in last, who was in that meeting, who sent that attachment again?  Retracing our steps is where enterprise search has been stuck, typing a keyword, not seeing what we want, and typing more keywords until we’re close getting the information we need – or walking room to room until we find our keys… retracing our steps.

 

We believe that for search to work, search needs to evolve – to free you from searching and allow you to discover, and as a result allow you to find your free time.  This is where Microsoft Search in Microsoft 365 comes in.  We’re looking at search differently.  We don’t want to have you ask yourself where you put your keys, we want to tell you where they are.

 

Microsoft Search is your default search experience across Microsoft 365 apps and services, built with AI technologies from Microsoft Bing and intelligence and insights from the Microsoft Graph, Microsoft Search delivers contextually relevant results, when you need them, – whether in Microsoft Word or SharePoint, Microsoft Search is there to help you get answers to your questions and make more time for you - where you’re already working, across the applications and services you use every day.

 

Things you can do...

 

Microsoft Search is ready when you are, just click in the new search box and instantly see answers and insights from the applications, people, and information that matter the most.

 

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Microsoft Search allows you to discover people, insights, and information across Microsoft 365 apps and services – delivering contextually relevant results and answers where you’re working.  Microsoft Search allows you to focus on what’s important, you’ll spend more time getting work done, rather than searching for your work.  Learn more about Microsoft Search at https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Search-Blog/Welcome-to-Microsoft-Search-intelligent....   

 

What’s coming... 

Delivering contextually relevant results from Microsoft 365 is just the tip of the iceberg, over the course of the next several months we’ll be expanding Microsoft Search capabilities to include... 

 

Connecting your world of information... 

Information is everywhere, distributed across disparate systems, file shares, databases and more and you need to find knowledge quickly and easily regardless of where that information resides. Microsoft Graph Connectors, available now in preview, enable you to search over content sources beyond Microsoft 365.  

 

Roadmap Id 57065 

 

Connectors.gif

 

Learn more about Microsoft Graph Connectors from Microsoft Ignite.

Recording > https://medius.studios.ms/video/asset/PPT/IG19-SRCH40

PowerPoint Presentation > https://medius.studios.ms/video/asset/HIGHMP4/IG19-SRCH40

 

Learn more about Microsoft Graph Connectors at https://aka.ms/MicrosoftSearch/Connectors.

 

Additionally, later this year we will also deliver capabilities to set up custom verticals, add your own refiners, and use adaptive cards to create your own visualizations in the Microsoft Search result page in Office.com and SharePoint.

 

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Conversations and content, together...

For us, reading comprehension is a basic task, performed daily.  As early as in elementary school, we’re able to read articles, and answer questions about its key ideas and details. But for AI, full reading comprehension is still an elusive goal—but a necessary one if we’re going to measure and achieve general intelligence AI.  With Microsoft Search, machine comprehension will give a precise answer rather than a URL that contains the answer somewhere within a lengthy web page. Moreover, machine comprehension models can understand specific knowledge embedded in documents that usually cover narrow and specific domains, where the search data that algorithms depend upon is sparse.  Semantic search with Microsoft Search provides new conversational experiences to retrieve answers in context.

 

Roadmap Id 57063

 

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Learn more about semantic search in Microsoft Search from Microsoft Ignite.

Recording > https://medius.studios.ms/video/asset/HIGHMP4/IG19-SRCH30

PowerPoint Presentation > https://medius.studios.ms/video/asset/PPT/IG19-SRCH30

 

Unraveling the mystery of acronyms

The world's longest acronym, according to the Guinness Book of World Records is NIIOMTPLABOPARMBETZHELBETRABSBOMONIMONKONOTDTEKHSTROMONT.  With AI mined acronym answers in Microsoft Search we'll do the hard work to figure it out.  Microsoft Search helps you define acronym answers and recommend AI mined answers from your organization.

 

Roadmap Id 57064

 

Acronym Answers.gif

 

 

And it’s not just curated acronyms, Microsoft Search’s AI technology mines for acronyms across your files and email to find other relevant definitions; you'll be able to view acronyms that in your email,  files, and shared documents.

 

Getting insights into who knows what and who’s who

How much time do you spend looking for someone who can help answer a difficult question…  Finding expertise isn’t always easy, out of date profiles, self-nominated areas of expertise, or incomplete people information makes it hard to make the connections that matter the most – finding colleagues who can help you or helping colleagues find you.

 

By integrating the people answers in Microsoft Search when searching for specific topics, we can help people connect easily and efficiently. Microsoft Search is the ideal canvas to present people results for topics as it spans across mail, documents, teams, and is common and natural for people to look up topics unknown to them in search bar.

 

In addition to finding expertise, we’re also announcing support for searching on an individual’s attributes. Attribute search makes finding people easier than ever, with attribute search you can now located individuals based on their unique attributes, for example, searching for Sofia or Sofia the Engineer in London.

 

Roadmap Id 57067

 

People Centric Search.gif

 

Customizable to meet your needs

Change is difficult.  The benefit of Microsoft Search is that you don’t have to change what you’ve been doing.  If you’ve built your enterprise search experience around SharePoint, we’re making it easy to keep doing what you’ve been doing.  With upcoming customization options, you can use the tried and true SharePoint Framework to customize the appearance of Microsoft Search in your organizations and develop applications on top of Microsoft Search with our new Microsoft Search Graph API (public preview).  For samples and more, visit Microsoft Search on GitHub at https://github.com/microsoft-search.

 

Screen Shot 2019-12-04 at 12.07.42 PM.png

 

 

Roadmap Id 57064, 32738, 57068, 57133, 57135, 57131

 

Learn more about customizing Microsoft Search from Microsoft Ignite.

Recording > https://medius.studios.ms/video/asset/HIGHMP4/IG19-SRCH50

 

Learn more about the Microsoft Search public API in the Microsoft Graph from Microsoft Ignite.

Recording > https://medius.studios.ms/video/asset/HIGHMP4/IG19-THR4000

PowerPoint Presentation > https://medius.studios.ms/video/asset/PPT/IG19-THR4000

 

Make the most of Microsoft Search

Whether you’re looking for how to make the most of search, fine tune your results, or just keep up to date with the latest news and announcements, we’re here to help.  Bookmark our resource center at https://aka.ms/MicrosoftSearch and join the conversation online at https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Search/ct-p/MicrosoftSearch or on Twitter @microsoftsearch.

8 Comments
Steel Contributor

Great article Bill, thanks for the new details. Will Exchange email be included in this central search point in the future? I don't see any connectors for it yet. 

Silver Contributor

Thanks Bill. In the Graph Connectors section the recording and presentation links need to be switched with each other! The good thing is I found that PowerPoint deck! ;)

Bronze Contributor

These features look really good, being able to search ServiceNow is a big plus, my customers are going to love that. Thanks Bill.

Silver Contributor

Great article, @Bill Baer, looking forward to seeing these improvements in the Microsoft search.

Microsoft

@Andrew Warland While we don't have a native connector at this time from Microsoft for Exchange, our partner Accenture, does provide an Exchange connector for Microsoft Search.  Microsoft native connectors include:

 

File share

MS SQL

ServiceNow

MediaWiki

Enterprise Websites

ADLS Gen2

Connector APIs

Microsoft

@Andrew Hodges Thanks!

Microsoft

@John Wynne Thanks John.  I'll correct the links ASAP.

Bronze Contributor
Is there any plans to use the data from Q&A Maker (which can be used in a Teams Bot for example) as a source for the Search box? As it is now, you'd have to enter data into the Q&A part of Search Admin AND in the Q&A Maker. https://www.qnamaker.ai/
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‎Dec 05 2019 07:34 AM
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