Microsoft Search Blog articles

ServiceNow Tickets connector is generally available

Mahesh_Singhania — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 08:08:49 GMT

We are excited to announce the launch of the Microsoft Graph connector for ServiceNow Tickets. Now you can index tickets from ServiceNow and end users can search for these tickets in Microsoft Search and Copilot.

Tickets is a system provided by ServiceNow for enterprises to manage and resolve IT issues efficiently. A ticket is a special document or record that captures details about incidents and requests. It is generated by employees or automated systems, which are then assigned to IT agents for resolution. For more details, check out this link.

How to configure the ServiceNow Tickets connector?

Navigate to the Connectors catalog page. Select ServiceNow and from the right panel, select ServiceNow Tickets. Follow the steps as mentioned in the ServiceNow Tickets Graph connector documentation.

Key Features

1. Define users who can access tickets: The connector supports search permissions, ensuring that indexed tickets are only visible to users with appropriate access. You can select up to 25 properties to define who can access ServiceNow tickets in Microsoft Search & Copilot (Opened by, Assigned to, Resolved by, Last reopened by, and more)

2. Choose from multiple authentication methods: The connector supports multiple authentication methods, including Basic Authentication, ServiceNow OAuth, and Microsoft Entra ID OpenID Connect.

3. Select only the type of tickets you want to index: You can choose to index only incident tickets or change requests by selecting the appropriate table in 'Select properties' screen.

We are sure you will find the ServiceNow Tickets Graph connector useful. We welcome your feedback and suggestions to improve it.

Get started

Refer to the ServiceNow Tickets documentation, to learn more about configuring the ServiceNow Tickets Graph connector.
Head to Search & Intelligence section in the M365 admin center to get started.
Also, check out documentation for Microsoft Graph connectors for ServiceNow Knowledge and Catalog.
- ServiceNow Catalog Microsoft Graph connector | Microsoft Docs
- ServiceNow Knowledge Microsoft Graph connector | Microsoft Docs

Staged rollout management for Graph connectors is generally available

Mahesh_Singhania — Mon, 04 Dec 2023 07:38:53 GMT

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.

How to setup Staged Rollout

Sign into the Search & intelligence portal.
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.
In the connection setup, you’ll see a new button ‘Publish to limited users’ allowing you to deploy the connector to a limited audience.

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.

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.

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.

Identify usage gaps with enhanced user analytics in Microsoft Search analytics

SanjayKulkarni — Wed, 29 Nov 2023 18:27:03 GMT

Based on a previous TEI study, Forrester found that companies actively using a search solution like Microsoft Search in Bing could save each employee from 55 to 82 hours per year otherwise spent searching in other ways. Optimizing the usage of all search applications powered by Microsoft Search, the savings could be even bigger.

The enhanced user analytics in the Search & Intelligence admin portal gives you a complete picture of search adoption and the value search brings to your organization. User analytics now cover Outlook, Teams, Windows Search, OneDrive, and search in Word/Excel/PowerPoint in addition to the existing search applications like SharePoint, Microsoft365.com and Microsoft Search in Bing.

This report can now be accessed under Microsoft 365 Admin Center | Settings | Search & Intelligence | Insights tab.

Understand the usage of Microsoft Search in your organization

Understand the search engagement and pattern for your users through enhanced user analytics. The main view shows a snapshot of usage over the past 28 days with number of users who searched, users searching weekly, and users that are not searching. The latter metric shows users that accessed one or more applications that offer search but didn’t use the search feature. That number represents productivity potential in new users taking advantage of time savings by using Microsoft Search.

Review the User engagement graph to understand how frequently your users are using search. A high number of users in the “9+ days” category represents a higher search engagement in the organization. The Search users by application graph shows a distribution of where users are searching from. Validate that the distribution aligns with the usage of the different applications in the organization. If the top collaboration tool shows low search usage, that might be worth reviewing.

Determine the usage of individual search applications

Analyze the Search users by application graph to identify if the search usage is as expected for each of your search applications. Dive into the data with the Search application filter to view analytics like User engagement specific to that application.

Visit the Analytics detail page to get distribution of search users on geography, department, and occupation. The detail page also allows you to filter in on any of the aforementioned dimensions to drill in and identify adoption gaps in the organization.

Actions to take if usage is lower than expected

Use enhanced User analytics to compare user engagement and adoption across the search applications and time periods. Which one of the two graphs does your user engagement look like?

The graph on the left indicates that users are regularly engaging with search, while the graph on the right might indicate that user engagement could be improved. Consider actions such as:

Validate key metrics for users who searched, users searching weekly and users with no search activity. What is the potential to increase Users searching weekly and addressing Users with no search activity?
Check the user engagement. Engaged users will show a high number of users searching 9+ days in the current period. Is the engagement as expected overall and for each search application?
Check the distribution of search activity across all search applications. Where do you have gaps in search adoption?
Visit the user analytics detail page for more insights and use the filters to identify adoption gaps. What search application, region, or department are lagging in search adoption? Will awareness or training help?

Training and awareness campaigns can help address search adoption gaps in the organization by:

Educating users on how to use search effectively and efficiently. Users who are familiar with the search features and functionalities can find relevant information faster and easier, which can improve their productivity and satisfaction.
Raising awareness of the benefits and value of search. Users who understand how search can help them solve problems, answer questions, and discover new insights can leverage search more often and more strategically, which can enhance their performance and innovation.
Encouraging feedback and collaboration. Users who share their search experiences, challenges, and best practices with each other and with the search team can foster a culture of learning and improvement, which can increase their engagement and loyalty.
Creating and distributing user guides, tutorials, videos, webinars, or newsletters that highlight the search capabilities and use cases for each search application.
Organizing and promoting events, workshops, or contests that showcase the search success stories and outcomes for different roles, functions, or projects.
Soliciting and rewarding user feedback, suggestions, or testimonials that demonstrate the search impact and value for various scenarios, goals, or tasks.

The new analytics tool helps optimize the value that search can bring to every individual and the entire organization by monitoring user adoption and addressing the gaps on a regular basis.

How to provide feedback

We’re as excited as you are about this feature launch and look forward to your feedback and comments below. If you have any questions or clarifications, email us at searchadminxteam@service.microsoft.com. We’re happy to engage with you and hear your thoughts and feedback!

What's new in Microsoft Graph Connectors - Nov 2023 edition

Mahesh_Singhania — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 12:58:05 GMT

Microsoft Graph connectors continue to be a powerful extensibility option for Microsoft 365 Copilot and Search. They index your valuable organization content in Microsoft Graph.

The Graph also enables Copilot to reason over the entire breadth of your enterprise content. You may index content from data sources like File shares, Service Now, Jira, Confluence, Salesforce etc. and deploy Copilot as your complete AI-powered productivity solution.

Here are some recent updates related to Microsoft Graph connectors.

New Microsoft-built Graph connectors

ServiceNow Tickets and Confluence are latest additions to your out of box connectors catalog.

Microsoft Graph connector for ServiceNow Tickets

ServiceNow Tickets is one of the most popular IT ticketing system used to track service requests, events, incidents, and alerts. Graph Connector for ServiceNow Tickets is the third in series of Microsoft-built connectors for ServiceNow, following Knowledge base articles and Catalog items connectors. Effective discovery and tracking of tickets streamlines the IT processes and increases resolution speed. The connector addresses the need to access ServiceNow tickets from within the M365 ecosystem, a common ask of many organizations.

It indexes ServiceNow tickets in Microsoft Graph, making it easier to find relevant ticket information and get answers to enterprise knowledge questions in a single place. Thereby directly improving productivity, collaboration, and customer satisfaction.

Users will be able to index ticket properties from the task table in ServiceNow, enabling them to find relevant ticket information quickly and easily. The connector also supports indexing tickets properties from extended task tables, providing flexibility and control over the indexed information.

Admins can choose to go with ServiceNow access levels, and also select property mapping to users. This ensures that the ticket information is only visible to the authorized users and respects the data privacy and security policies of the organization.

The connector is now available in targeted release, and you may configure it from the M365 Admin center. The connector will be generally available in December 2023.

Microsoft Graph connector for Confluence server/datacenter

Confluence is a wiki platform used for collaboration, knowledge management, and documentation. Microsoft Graph connector for Confluence server/data center allows you to index Confluence Server or Data center content in Microsoft Graph. This is the second Confluence connector following the first one Confluence cloud connector, which is generally available already.

Indexing Confluence for Microsoft Copilot and Search enables teams to collaborate efficiently and end-users to retrieve information quickly. The Confluence On-Premises Connector honors the Confluence's environment permissions and allows authorized users to indexed content.

The connector is in preview. If you wish to get early access to try it, sign-up using this form.

Better manageability of your connections

Staged rollout

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. One 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 can be setup on a connection as follows:

In the Search and Intelligence portal, under the Data Sources tab, go to 'Display all connections' section. The connection list has a column 'Staged Rollout'. The link under this column can be used to add or edit staged rollout settings.

While creating a new connection, one can use the 'Publish to limited users' button alongside the 'Publish' button.

The list of users and groups can be added in the staging config.

Learn more about Staged rollout feature in the documentation. Staged rollout capability is currently being rolled out world-wide and is expected to be generally available by December 2023.

Advanced crawl scheduling

Advanced Crawl Scheduling for Microsoft Graph connectors provides admins with greater flexibility over the scheduling of their connection crawls.

Admins can now schedule crawls to occur during specific hours of the day and on specific days of the week. This allows them to better plan their crawls and avoid potential conflicts with other system activities.

The new advanced crawl scheduling options are now generally available, and you may re-configure any existing crawls to follow desired new schedule. The same can be done by editing your connections and making changes in the “Refresh Settings”. You will see new scheduling options while creating a new connection as well. All the existing schedules have been automatically translated into the advanced scheduling configuration. So, you do not need to worry about losing your existing schedules.

To know more advanced crawl scheduling refer our documentation about setting crawl schedules.

Service Health notifications

Service Health notifications help customers stay informed about the status of their Graph Connector crawls and take actions when necessary.

One of the challenges that admins face when using Graph Connectors is keeping track of crawl failures. Crawl failures can occur for a variety of reasons, such as authentication issues, data source unreachability, or an unknown internal issue. With the new Graph Connector Notifications feature, admins will be notified about crawl failures and provided with the right information to help them navigate to the respective location to resolve the issue.

By providing timely notifications and actionable information, these notifications will help resolve crawl failures and maintain the freshness of your search index.

Following is a notification sample for admin to act on.

Admins can browse through all the notifications that need action.

Each notification has detail on the actions and diagnostics of the issue.

Service Health notifications are now generally available and can be monitored from the Service Health dashboard on M365 Admin center. You can subscribe to get these notifications over e-mail as well by giving up to two e-mail ids.

To learn more about these notifications refer our documentation page about notifications.

We hope these features improve your overall experience with the Microsoft Graph connectors product. Excited to hear your feedback.

What's New in Microsoft Search

SanjayKulkarni — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 15:57:30 GMT

The goal of Microsoft Search is to help people find what they’re searching for when they need it. Sometimes, it can be hard for users to find exactly what they need with content stored in multiple places. Based on your feedback, we've been working on changes to improve the experience and make it easier and faster for the users to find what they’re searching for.

We’re excited to share highlights some of these improvements in the following areas: Workplace Search, Microsoft Search in Windows and the Edge address bar, Graph Connectors, and Search administration and analytics.

Workplace Search

When searching for work content, there is more consistency, privacy, context, searchable content types, and actions.

A unified search experience across endpoints

Users now have access to the same Workplace Search capabilities in Bing, SharePoint, and Microsoft365.com. This means no matter where users search, the results will be the same, as will the look and feel.

Teams and Outlook messages are included in search results on Microsoft365.com and Bing in the new Messages vertical.

Videos also appear in a separate vertical for organization-wide searches.

More privacy labels and access settings

When logged in to Bing, search results show an “Only you can see this” label when the user is the only person that has access to a specific file.

Users can also view and manage who has access to files from the “Who can see this?” option in the file action menu, located directly on the search results page. Users can only do this if they own the file or have permission to update the file or its permissions.

More context and actions for search results

Search results now include more context as why a file comes up as a result. The context is based on the last file action, such as accessing, modifying, or sending it.

Actions such as downloading a file, copying a link, or can also be completed right from the search box.

Microsoft Search in Windows and Edge

We brought the power of Microsoft Search to Windows and the Edge address bar to help users find what they need without having to switch to a new platform or app and leave what they’re working on.

What’s new for Microsoft Search in Windows

When users select the search box in the Windows taskbar, a search home page will appear. On the home page, users can find work search history and search suggestions, as well as bookmarks and acronyms.

Acronyms are now searchable within an organization as well as on the web.

Users can get faster access to files in the Windows search box by adding a few characters of the file name or the author. Any file that has been recently opened, shared, commented on, and mentioned is shown instantly.

Users can also narrow down the scope of their search through the work filter. This filter is dedicated specifically to work results.

In the Windows 10 taskbar, users can get to the work filter and search their work content by directly selecting their company logo or the briefcase icon to the right of the search box.

If the work results don’t match what the user is expecting, there’s an option to browse through additional organizational content. Work results can subsequently be filtered with options such as People, Files, as well as third-party Graph Connectors such as Jira, ServiceNow, and more.

What’s new for Microsoft Search in Edge

Users can now search for people, sites, files, and more directly from their browser. As they search, relevant search results will automatically be suggested in the address bar. The most relevant results will be elevated to the top of the search box for easy access.

As they search, they will automatically get suggestions for files, people, SharePoint sites, and bookmarks in the address bar as well.

Graph Connectors

It’s now easier to choose which Graph Connectors results are displayed and manage how they are organized on the page.

Results merged inline in All vertical

When Graph Connectors are used to add content sources, users can search for them in the All vertical by default. They can see the results from Graph Connector data sources merged inline with all the other results from Microsoft apps such as SharePoint, OneDrive for Business, or Power BI in SharePoint home and Microsoft365.com.

Control which Graph Connector results are displayed

In the Microsoft 365 admin center, a new panel for managing connection results in the All vertical has been added, allowing you to choose which connections are displayed to the user.

You also don't need to map a connection to a custom vertical. New connections for Search can be enabled immediately upon publishing.

Learn more about how Graph Connector inline results work.

Search administration and analytics

We recently announced a new homepage for the Search and intelligence admin portal experience, designed to be more intuitive and user-friendly. You can quickly and easily access the configurations and insights you need right from the homepage. There are also new changes to search analytics.

Learn more about what you can do with the admin portal experience.

New Answer analytics

Answer analytics help you understand how editorial content such as bookmarks, acronyms, and Q&A are performing and identify items that don’t work as expected. Learn more about answer analytics usage reports.

New search usage reports and item insights

User analytics give you more insight into user engagement and adoption across the search applications and allow you to identify adoption gaps based on geography, department, and occupation. User analytics now include queries from Windows Search, Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Those are all the updates we have for now. We hope these features are useful. If you have any thoughts or suggestions, please provide your feedback via the feedback tool on the search results page. We’re currently working on several other new and exciting features, and we look forward to sharing more when they’re released.

Introducing the new Search & Intelligence admin portal experience

SanjayKulkarni — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 18:19:00 GMT

We are excited to announce that we are rolling out a new homepage for the Search & intelligence admin portal, the central place to learn and administer Microsoft Search capabilities for your organization. The new homepage provides you with a single entry point to access a range of Microsoft Search features and functions, such as Graph connectors, user feedback, Microsoft Search educational content, and more. The new homepage also helps you discover new ways to enhance your search experience and monitor feature status.

About the new Admin experience

The new homepage is designed to be intuitive and user-friendly, allowing you to quickly access and view the necessary information to make your organization successful with the power of Microsoft Search. You can easily navigate and interact with the different tiles and, in the future, customize your homepage by pinning your favorite tiles.

The connectors tile shows you the status of each connection in your tenant and any errors or warnings. You can also use the tile to quickly create a new connection, edit an existing connection, or troubleshoot issues. The connectors tile will help you monitor and optimize the performance and quality of your connections and ensure your users can find the most relevant and up-to-date info from your external sources.

The user feedback tile provides a summary representation of the most recent feedback provided by your users. This feedback is a valuable source of insight to understand how people are using and perceiving Microsoft Search, and which improvements they’d like to see. The user feedback tile helps you to listen to your users and respond to their needs and expectations.

The learning tile provides you with insightful information to continue to improve search in your organization, showing best practices, tips, and resources to help you leverage the full potential of Microsoft Search. This tile will also help you to stay informed and engaged with Microsoft Search and its evolution.

The analytics tile will help you see the usage and performance of Microsoft Search in your organization. You’ll be able to access reports and dashboards that show you key metrics and trends, such as query volume, click-through rate, and more. You will also be able to drill down into specific aspects of the search experiences. The analytics tile will help you evaluate and optimize the effectiveness and value of Microsoft Search for your users and business goals.

The answers tile will help you manage and address any open actions for your editorial answers, which are custom answers you can provide for specific queries or topics in Microsoft Search. You can use editorial answers to address common or important questions, guide users to relevant resources, and enhance the search relevance and user satisfaction.

How do I access the new homepage?

The new homepage will be available to all Search Admins when they log in to the Search & intelligence section of the Microsoft 365 admin center. In the Microsoft 365 admin center, go to Settings > Search & intelligence.

We encourage you to explore the new homepage and let us know what you think by using the feedback button in the portal, or by contacting us at SearchAdmin_Feedback@microsoft.com. We hope you enjoy the new Search & intelligence admin portal homepage and find it useful and valuable for managing your Microsoft Search experiences.

New Answer Analytics in Microsoft Search Usage Reports

wbaer — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 18:18:13 GMT

Answer Analytics in Microsoft Search usage reports

Whether you're searching for people, files, organization charts, sites, or answers to common questions, you can always use Microsoft Search throughout your workday to get answers. As Search administrators for your organization, you can configure editorial answers such as bookmarks, acronyms and Q&A within the Search and Intelligence admin portal. This will help users find the right content to complete their tasks in the apps where they’re already working.

In addition to providing you with capabilities to create Answers, we are excited to announce that we have now started providing usage analytics for these Answers. This report is now available under Microsoft 365 admin center | Settings | Search & intelligence | Overview | Answer Analytics section.

Looking for the most popular answer types in your organization? Analytics usage reports has the data!

The answer impressions graph gives a split of bookmark, acronym and Q&A impressions within your organization. You can now use this graph to understand the most popular answer type within your organization and use it to decide which answer type to create for solving search abandonment and no result queries.

Use Answer Analytics reports to improve Bookmarks in your organization

Bookmarks impressions and clicks data is now available at an individual bookmark level. Use this report to understand the bookmarks that are not impressing within your organization and take action to improve the keywords or remove them.

For Bookmarks that have very high impressions and very low clicks, use the queries section to understand the search terms that are causing the bookmark to over trigger and use this to improve the bookmark keywords.

Identifying Answers that need your attention

As Search admins, your job requires you to ensure that your answer inventory is up to date and is helping users find content. The Answer Analytics report provides Average click rate and Average impression numbers for Bookmarks, Acronyms and Q&A respectively to help you quickly identify the answer items that need your attention. If a bookmark is receiving below Average click rate, examine the queries, bookmark title, URL and click numbers to identify if there are duplicates, opportunities to improve the title and definition and whether the URL is working as expected. For Acronyms and Q&A we provide the Average impressions as a benchmark to quickly identify answers that might need improvement.

We also provide the system curated and admin curated acronym split for you to understand the value Microsoft Search provides through intelligent answer curation experience.

Graph Connector results merged inline in All vertical

wbaer — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 17:24:41 GMT

Microsoft Graph Connectors enable you to connect external content sources (such as File shares, SaaS applications, CRM systems) into Microsoft Search, making all your enterprise content searchable in one place. By having all your content accessible in endpoints like SharePoint home, Office.com and Work@Bing.com, you reduce the overhead of context switching by keeping the information you need at your fingertips.

What’s new?

When you use Graph Connectors to add content sources, your users will be able to search for them in the All vertical by default. They can see the results from Graph Connector data sources merged inline with all the other results from Microsoft apps (for example, SharePoint, OneDrive for Business, or PowerBI) in SharePoint home and Office.com.

This is an improvement over the current result cluster experience, which is bound to a fixed place in the middle of the page and has a maximum of 2 results from a single custom vertical. With inline merging, Graph Connector results from all selected sources are seamlessly integrated into the search page and are ranked by their relevance to the search query.

Please find below a comparison of Graph Connectors in Result Cluster versus Inline results.

Feature	Result cluster	Inline results (NEW)
No. of results in All vertical	Max 2	No cap on number of results
Availability of connector results on Pages 2 and beyond	No	Yes
Default filter application (last modified, file type)	No result cluster is shown on filter application	Connector results can appear on filter application
Requirement of custom vertical	Yes	No custom vertical required – a connection can be enabled for All vertical participation directly
Deselecting a Graph Connector source from being shown in All vertical	No	Yes

Admin controls

Search admins can control which connections are shown to the user in the All vertical. In the M365 admin center, a new panel for managing connection results in the All vertical has been added (Search & Intelligence > Customizations > Verticals > All > Manage connection results).

Limitations

Connector inline results experience is not available in Microsoft Search in Bing (MSB) and at SharePoint site search scope. Support for these surfaces is expected to follow by the end of 2023.

How does it work?

When a user issues a search query, the system returns items from all data sources that are enabled for the All vertical. The system ranks and merges these items to return a single list of relevance-ordered results which are shown to the user in a paginated list. Please note that inline results are powered by an AI model, that is non-deterministic. This means, the AI model will pay attention to the user query, previous interactions of users in a company with a specific source and many more features to decide which results are most relevant for the query. The model will be continuously adapted and adjusted based on user interactions, for example, by clicking on specific results.

As a result, a user may see none or many connector results based on the AI models assessment of whether specific items are relevant for each individual query term.

In this example, the query “Sahara project” shows results from Confluence, SharePoint, and ServiceNow to the user as there are relevant items with matching titles from these sources:

In this example, the query “Change security settings” shows results only from Confluence to the user as there are relevant matching items only in that source:

In this example, the query “Presentation templates” shows only results from SharePoint as there are no relevant matching items from any connector data source:

Recommendations

You can contribute to ensure discovery of connector content by attributing the appropriate semantic labels for every connection. Semantic labels help the system identify shared properties such as title, last modified datetime, created by, etc. across different connections and use these features in ranking items for a given query.
You should ensure that Graph connector search results do not interrupt the users’ habitual scanning patterns. Please review the adaptive cards, which determine the appearance and experience of the results in the search result list. For example,
- add an icon to your custom result types – it makes the source of the content transparent to users.
- verify that all results are correctly indented and are vertically aligned.

What’s next?

Inline merged results in Work tab @ Bing.com – coming soon in 2023

Tips and tricks on how to search for organizational content more effectively

wbaer — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 17:05:28 GMT

Across Microsoft solutions, it is possible to search for work/organizational content in many different entry points, such as Office.com, Sharepoint.com and Microsoft Bing - Work tab.

Office.com and Sharepoint.com are great places to start a search across all your personal and content accessible to you within your organization, including shared documents, offering capabilities that can help you navigate content in a way that suits you the best.

This post will guide you through some of the most frequent work search tasks and demonstrate how you can achieve them with different methods. You will learn how to optimize your search experience and access the information you need efficiently.

It all starts with the Search box.

The Search box can help you find your recent content quickly and easily. It shows you suggestions of Files, People, and Apps that you interact with frequently.

How does starting your search in Office.com or Sharepoint.com looks like

You can also use keywords like “ppt” or “doc” to refine the results you are seeing in the Search box suggestions.

Retrieve Word documents by using ‘doc’ keyword.

Retrieve PowerPoint documents by using ‘ppt’ keyword.

You can also get People results in Search box suggestions based on their phone number or department.

People search suggestions based on phone number.

People search suggestions based on department name.

Navigating to Search Results Page

If you don’t see what you are looking for in Search box suggestions, press enter or click ‘Show more results’ to go to the results page to explore more content. You can use different tabs or filters to refine the results you are seeing.

As an example, you can use People tab and different keywords to search for people based on their department or job title.

Search for People based on department name.

Search for People based on job title.

Or go to Messages tab to find an Email or a Teams message with specific keywords.

Email and Teams messages search.

Easily navigate through your own content

Navigating through your own content daily can be challenging. Sometimes you may want to search for a specific document you created or edited, or a message/email you sent. This can be easily done by typing your name in the Search box and clicking on the Search box suggestion. This opens up a Person Centric Search view shown below.

It is worth noting that Messages tab is currently available in Office.com and is yet to come to Sharepoint.com

Navigating to People Centric Search view by clicking on suggestions in the Search Box

You can further narrow down your own content by typing additional keywords in the search box next to the name pill or using filter and tab refiners.

Using keyword + File Type filter to further refine your search

Search for people and content they shared.

You can search for your colleagues’ content or understand their position in the organizational chart by looking them up and clicking on their name from the search box suggestion.

Browse through content your colleagues have shared with you.

Understand your company organization and who your colleagues report to.

This feature only shows public content and content that has been explicitly shared with you by the person you are looking up. Hence in some cases, you may not get any results.

You can only browse through content explicitly shared with you.

Getting to work search results in Microsoft Bing

We are currently working to bring the same set of search capabilities across Office.com, Sharepoint.com and Bing.com/work.

To access work search in Bing.com, you need to be signed into Bing with your organizational account. This will enable you to see top work search results in the All-Tab. You can further explore work content by clicking some of the work result suggestions or going straight to Work tab.

Work result suggestions in All-Tab

Work search results in Work-Tab

On images below, we are showing how some of the searches mentioned in this article may look like in Bing.com/work.

Email and Teams messages search

People search by name.

Understand your company organization and who your colleagues report to.

You can only browse through content explicitly shared with you.

Search Relevance for Microsoft Graph Connectors - A look under the hood

wbaer — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 19:43:17 GMT

Author: Tobias Hassmann

Search Relevance for Microsoft Graph Connectors

A look under the hood

Microsoft Graph Connectors enable your organization to bring your data from multiple sources into Microsoft 365. They allow you to have all relevant information for your work at your fingertips. With Microsoft Graph Connectors you can bring information from systems like ServiceNow or internal Websites into Microsoft Search and make that information available in all key endpoints like SharePoint Online, Office.com, and Bing. This avoids unnecessary context switching or moving between applications. The foundation for all this is Search: it ensures that you find and discover what you need in no time. Our team of dedicated Microsoft Search engineers and data scientists is committed to continually improving and optimizing search result relevance.

Where can I find Graph Connector content in Microsoft Search?

When you onboard content via Graph Connectors, it will be indexed in Office 365. The content is hosted in a compliant environment and remains in your tenant’s boundary. Microsoft Search uses top-notch Artificial Intelligence technology to ensure the best possible discovery and search relevance for Graph Connector content.

Graph Connector content in SharePoint Online, Office.com, Bing.com Work vertical

Microsoft Search users find Graph Connector content in the All vertical and in dedicated custom verticals. In response to a top customer request, we will show Graph Connected content merged inline in the All vertical with Microsoft Office 365 content based on its relevance score in the first half of 2023. As a result, Graph connector results will be seamlessly integrated into the search UI. This allows users to apply filters or pagination to further refine their search – including Graph Connector content.

Users can find all relevant work content in the All vertical on SharePoint Online, including Microsoft Graph Connector content. It is seamlessly integrated into the All vertical for better discoverability and easy engagement.

Users can also search for Graph Connected content in custom verticals, which are created and managed by the tenant search administrator.

Graph Connector content in other clients

Connected content is also available in the Work vertical in Windows search. Windows Search follows the vertical configuration on Bing.com, Office.com and SharePoint Online and thus ensures a coherent experience for all company users. All results are personalized, and all content adheres to the same access controls and permissions that are applied across all Microsoft Search experiences.

In Teams mobile you can search for Graph Connector content from within custom verticals on the go.

This screenshot shows results from a ServiceNow Graph Connector shown on Teams Mobile under a vertical called “Support KB”. Users can simply select a result and are routed to the respective article.

Users can access their important work content on the go and without needing to change applications. In Teams mobile users can also find results from custom Microsoft Graph Connectors, for example, Figma content (first screenshot). When the user clicks, they are directed to the Figma file directly (second screenshot).

Finally – the look under the hood!

Search is key to ensure that users, who are looking for Graph Connector content, always find what they need so that they can be more productive. Search is a complex and broad task that is best solved at scale via Artificial Intelligence-technology. Microsoft Search delivers on this task for you and for all your company content. Also, Search always operates within compliant boundaries.

New search relevance models are updated and evaluated all the time. They become successively available for all customers if they measurably improve search. Models learn from various user interaction data what results are most relevant for a given query. Thanks to Artificial Intelligence, the models can predict and generalize for queries that have never been issued before and for content that does not even exist yet.

The search models use numerous features to find relevant results for a query. Most of them are not noticeable by users. A short list of features may demonstrate how Search is constantly improving and adapting to your tenant needs:

Search utilizes a variety of characteristics associated with the content, the user query, and the query-content connection to identify the most pertinent content for a query and arrange the content by relevance.
Search tracks and learns which content is trending and popular.
No matter if your query is composed of singular or plural terms, the search will yield relevant documents.
Search understands what content is popular with the tenants and individual users and ranks it accordingly.

What can I do as an administrator to ensure awesome relevance?

Microsoft Search ensures that search over Graph Connector content works well out of the box for any scenario. This also means that you save time to focus on other . For the best possible out of the box relevance, you can do the following:

Upon Graph connector onboarding, define search attributes. Also ensure to map semantic labels as appropriate, which are essential for great out of the box search relevance.
Make sure that Graph Connector items have meaningful titles. That is, a title should clearly describe and represent what the item is about.
Ensure that the content property is filled with meaningful and representative text content.
Manage your content diligently throughout its lifespan: ensure that your important content is indexed, and that outdated content is removed.
Provide a meaningful name for your custom search verticals.
Leverage the multiple customization options for your verticals to cater them to your individual context.
Later in 2023, admins can add an importance weight to textual custom properties of Graph Connector content. This impacts the importance of a query term match in that property for ranking the search results. We suggest applying importance weights only when the search scenarios that they ought to address are well understood.
To ensure users remain focused on finding the most relevant results, review and adjust the result types using adaptive cards to optimize the appearance of Graph Connected content search results. This will minimize distractions when scanning the results.

Wrapping it up

Providing awesome relevance is a complex challenge that Microsoft Search is committed to solve for you. Microsoft Search will provide awesome relevance for you and all your content. It combines the power of Microsoft Graph Connectors, the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, a top-notch search stack paired with content management curation- and UX customization options to create a one-stop-shop for search over all content that matters to you, your users, and your company

Updated Connectors Results in Microsoft in Bing

wbaer — Thu, 06 Apr 2023 15:36:52 GMT

We are pleased to announce the general availability of Graph connectors results in the Bing Search Engine Results Page (SERP) for Microsoft Search customers. Microsoft Graph connectors offer an intuitive way to bring content from all your enterprise sources into your search environment, expanding the types of content sources that are searchable in your Microsoft ecosystem. Previously, these results were found in the connector verticals within the Microsoft Search in Bing Work vertical, Office.com, Teams, and SharePoint. Today, we have extended the footprint to the Bing SERP. This provides some key benefits:

Easy to find: Connector content is visible as a top answer, resulting in higher visibility and ease of discoverability. Any searches which include the name of a custom vertical will also deliver relevant connected content as an answer.
Quicker to search: People can now start their search from the Bing search box—no clicking in the Work tab required.
Parity between your content sources: Connector results in the Bing SERP allow your connected content to share the same visibility as files or people results. People will be able to find all their information.

Here’s an example of how it will look in Microsoft Search in Bing.

Connectors results will also be available in Windows Search in the coming months. Stay tuned! For any questions or feedback, please contact us.

Microsoft named a Leader in 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Insight Engines

wbaer — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 21:19:38 GMT

Microsoft recognized as a Leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant for Insight Engines

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Microsoft. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Insight Engines, Stephen Emmott, Anthony Mullen, David Pidsley, Tim Nelms, 12 December 2022

Gartner is a registered trademark and service mark and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved

We’re generating data faster than we can understand it. From finance and retail to manufacturing and genomics, petabytes of data are being collected and processed each day.

So where did all this information go?

In this new world of hybrid work, insight engines are our digital watercooler, our gateway to information, and Microsoft has now been named a leader in Gartner recently released 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Insight Engines (keep reading to learn how you can download a complimentary copy of this report).

According to the report, “Gartner defines insight engines as the ability to apply relevancy methods to describe, discover, organize, and analyze data. This allows existing or synthesized information to be delivered proactively or interactively, and in the context of digital workers, customers, or constituents at timely business moments.”

Microsoft delivers two integrated solutions to address our customers’ broad insight engines’ needs, Microsoft Search available to customers of Microsoft 365 and Azure Cognitive Search available as a platform as-a-service with Microsoft Azure.

Whether you’re already a customer of Microsoft 365 or you’re a professional developer or data scientist, we hope that you can use Microsoft Search and Azure Cognitive Search services to build impactful AI-powered search solutions that solve complex problems and enhance customer experience. Our philosophy is to meet our customers on either end of the search spectrum, whether the need is a turnkey solution to reason over enterprise data or the need for flexibility to tailor search to specific scenario. With integration between Microsoft Search and Azure Cognitive Search, we’re enabling you to leverage our combined strengths to meet the most complex and advanced solutions.

About Microsoft Search

Microsoft Search is a leading intelligent search solution available with Microsoft 365 that consolidates islands of information transforming information into knowledge and answers. Through innovative deep learning at scale, Microsoft Search harnesses the collective knowledge of your organization, extracting insights from structured and unstructured data, saving you time and money.

Learn more about Microsoft Search at www.microsoft.com/microsoft-search.

About Azure Cognitive Search

Azure Cognitive Search (formerly known as "Azure Search") is a cloud search service that gives developers infrastructure, APIs, and tools for building a rich search experience over private, heterogeneous content in web, mobile, and enterprise applications.

Learn more about Azure Cognitive Search at https://azure.microsoft.com/services/search.

Keep reading

Download your own complimentary copy of the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Insight Engines.

New Work vertical in Windows Search

wbaer — Thu, 22 Dec 2022 20:06:11 GMT

We’re pleased to announce the release of a major addition to Windows Search designed and created for workplace search: the Work vertical.

The new Work vertical is available now in Windows Search to users signed in to a work account.

What is the Work vertical?

The Work vertical is a new dedicated canvas for quick and reliable organization-wide search in Windows Search. It’s tailored for workplace search and work results are a click away and always visible. It provides a coherent, complete, and consistent search experience, bringing together Microsoft 365 and third-party data. It simplifies the overall workplace search experience and improves the discoverability of relevant work results with easy and reliable navigation by providing a quick and transient way for users to complete the task.

To help keep the focus on work, web results never appear when searching in the Work vertical. Also, the results are personalized and all content adheres to the same access controls and permissions that are applied across all Microsoft Search experiences.

When searching in the Work vertical, users can find all the results they expect in workplace search:

Answers, including bookmarks, Q&As, acronyms, and more
People
Files
Messages (Outlook emails and Teams chats)
Groups
Sites
Yammer
Connected data

Users can also easily narrow their search results by selecting a filter when they search.

Workplace search in Windows not only helps users find the information they need, it also helps them get to it even faster by opening files, messages, chats, and other results in the associated app.

Similar to other verticals in Windows Search, workplace search also supports a keyword that allows users to start their search by scoping it to work results only. Just enter Work: followed by your search term to let Windows Search know you only want to see work results.

For more details, including how to prepare for workplace search in Windows, see Use Windows Search to find work or school results.

What connected data can users find?

In addition to your organization’s Microsoft 365 content, your users can also find data from third parties you’ve connected to Microsoft Search via Graph Connectors, for example Service Now tickets, Salesforce data, your intranet websites, ADO work items, and many more. For information about adding a connector, see Microsoft Graph connectors overview for Microsoft Search.

Let us know what you think

We hope you find workplace search as helpful and valuable as our preview users have. If you have feedback, select More options (three dots) > Feedback > and include #WSBWorkScope in your comment. We look forward to hearing what you think!

Traditional Outlook attachment search now rolling out to Microsoft Search

wbaer — Mon, 05 Dec 2022 19:43:07 GMT

Microsoft Outlook lets you quickly choose whether to send the document as a traditional attachment or upload it to OneDrive and share a link to the file.

Sending a link to the OneDrive or SharePoint file keeps the size of your email message small. If you choose to send a copy of the file, the entire file is attached to the email, just like it would be if you selected a file on your computer.

Now with Microsoft Search you can now discover traditional attachments shared in Microsoft Outlook.

NOTE Traditional attachments in Microsoft Search are only visible to those who have access to those attachments similar to how attachments are surfaced in search in Outlook.

Currently attachment search is limited to Office.com in the people search experience as illustrated above.

Learn more about attachments in Microsoft Outlook at Attach files or insert pictures in Outlook email messages - Microsoft Support.

Learn more about Microsoft Search at Microsoft Search documentation | Microsoft Learn.

Introducing people insights (working-with) privacy controls

wbaer — Fri, 11 Nov 2022 21:00:57 GMT

In May 2020, we announced plans to have more granular privacy controls within Microsoft products. This is part of Microsoft’s continued commitment to providing products, information and controls that lets you choose how your data is collected and used. After this announcement, several controls have been released. Now we would like to announce the release of peopleInsights admin controls.

The hundreds of millions of users of Microsoft 365 cloud services form part of the core of Microsoft Graph. The users' data is carefully managed, protected, and with proper authorization, made available by Microsoft Graph services to drive productivity and creativity in businesses.

As ubiquitous the user's data is in Microsoft Graph, data derived from the user's interactions is particularly interesting. It provides intelligent insights that can be used to build smarter apps. The people API returns people ordered by relevance to a user, based on that user's contacts, organization directory, and recent public communications on email.

For a person to be included as relevant to or "working with" a profile owner in Office Delve, to be displayed in the owner's profile card, or to be returned by the people API, there must be a public relationship between the person and the profile owner. The following illustration shows a User A, an index of relationships with other users (User B), and a public profile showing a subset of user relationships.

We are pleased to announce new privacy controls which provide you with the ability to configure the visibility of the list of relevant people, also called Working-with or peopleInsights. The controls will give administrators the ability to disable the controls for all users by using “isEnabledInOrganization” parameter in Microsoft Graph. Alternatively, they can disable the feature on admin center by checking the “Allow your organization to use People Insights” checkbox shown below.

If an organization only needs to disable the feature for a group of people, they have the option of using the “disableForGroup” parameter. They will need to provide the id of an Azure AD group. The group should have all affected users. Note, only one group can be disabled. The alternative is using admin center page and adding the name of the group to be disabled for in the text field as shown above. The controls above respect the existing Office Delve settings already in place.

We are working on releasing user level controls as well in the future to ensure that at user level people have control over their own privacy.

What’s new for Microsoft Search Usage reports

wbaer — Fri, 11 Nov 2022 20:53:50 GMT

You’ve wanted to know how well search works for your organization. Microsoft Search usage reports have the data!

Enterprise users spend time every day searching for information. As a Search administrator for your organization, it’s very important for you to understand who your users are, what they search for, how they engage with search results, and their preferred search application so you can increase your users’ productivity by helping them easily find the information they are looking for.

We’re excited to announce that we’ve completed the roll out of an improved and enhanced Search usage reports to all WW tenants! You can access these reports in the Microsoft 365 admin center | Settings | Search & intelligence | Overview section. From there detailed reports on users, queries, and Microsoft Graph connectors can be easily accessed using the tabs on the left. Next let's dive into how you can use these reports to empower users in your organization.

Pivot total search queries on additional dimensions

As a Search administrator it’s critical for you to know how many search queries resulted in user action versus how many did not. The queries by user action report gives you just that! This chart shows how many queries resulted in a user click activity on search results versus no-click activity and no results returned.

You can further breakdown the abandoned and no-result queries on user profile dimensions like occupation, department, and country to get richer insights about user cohorts struggling to find information and those that are successful. With this information, creating Editorial answers that target these user groups and help them find information faster is a win-win for you and your users!

The wait for Microsoft Graph connector analytics is over!

Delivering world-class enterprise search is crucial for your organization and Microsoft Graph connectors play a vital role in achieving this by indexing content from external systems and making it discoverable using a single search application. In our upgraded reports, we’ve introduced a dedicated section for connection analytics to show the contribution of connectors to overall search queries.

The connection details section lets you see each connection's contribution to query volume and click-through rate for the selected time period. This information helps you identify the level of engagement for each connection and monitor how actions like configuring additional semantic labels improve the relevance and coverage for your connections.

We’ve also created several additional reports, including data about active versus engaged users, popular search terms with information on result type and result position, query volume and click-through trends to provide you a detailed view of how well Microsoft Search is working for your organization.

We’re as excited as you are about this feature launch, and we look forward to your feedback and comments below. If you have any questions or clarifications, email us at searchadminxteam@service.microsoft.com. We’re happy to chat with you and hear your thoughts and feedback!

Making Search Better Within Microsoft

wbaer — Thu, 27 Oct 2022 17:39:51 GMT

The Challenge

Five years ago employee satisfaction with finding information within the company was very low. it was the lowest rated it service among all those we surveyed about. Related surveys done by other teams supported this, for instance that our software engineers “finding information” as one of the most wasteful frustrating activities in their job, costing the company thousands of man years of productivity.

A project team was formed to improve this. In the years since we have pursued:

Improving search result relevance
Improving search content completeness
Address content quality issues

The Microsoft Search Environment

Microsoft has >300,000 employees working around the globe, and collectively, our employees use or access many petabytes of content as they move through their workday. within our employee base, there are many different personas who have widely varying search interests and use hundreds of content sources. Those content sources can be file shares, Microsoft sharepoint sites, documents and other files, and internal websites. our employees also frequently access external websites, such as hr partners’ websites.

We began with user satisfaction survey net score at 87 (scale of 1-200, with 200 being perfect). We have reached satisfaction of 117. Our goal is 130+.

What We’ve Done

Core to our progress has been:

Understanding the needs of the different personas around the company. At Microsoft, personas are commonly clustered based on three factors: their organization within the company, their profession, and their geographic location. For example, a Microsoft seller working in Latin America has different search interests than an engineer working in China.
1. Has resulted in targeting bookmarks to certain security groups.
2. Has led to outreach to certain groups and connecting with efforts they had underway to build a custom search portal or improve content discoverability.

Understanding typical search behavior. For instance, the diagram below shows that a relatively small number of search terms account for a large portion of the search activity.

We ensure bookmarks exist for most of the high frequency searches.
We look for commonalities in low frequency searches for potential content to connect in.

Improving content quality. This has ranged from deleting old content to educating content owners on most effective ways to adding metadata to their content so it ranks better in search results. As part of our partnership with this community, we provide reporting on measurable aspects of content quality. We are in early stages of pursuing quality improvement, with much to do in building a community across the company, measuring, and enabling metadata.

For those site owners actively using this reporting, we have seen a decrease of up to 70% in content with no recent updates.

Utilizing improvements delivered in product, from improved relevance ranking to UX options like custom filters.
1. We have seen steady improvement in result ranking.
2. We also take advantage of custom filters and custom result KQL.
3. We use Viva Topics. Topics now receive the most clicks after Bookmarks.

Making our search coverage more complete. Whether it’s via bookmarks or connectors, there are many ways of making the search experience feel like it covers the entire company.
1. We currently have 7 connections, one of which is custom built and brings in 10 different content sources. This content is clicked on in 5% of searches on our corporate SharePoint portal.
2. About half of our bookmarks (~600) point to URLs outside of the corporate boundary, such as third-party hosted services.

Analytics. Using SharePoint extensions, we capture all search terms and click actions on our corporate portal’s search page. We’ve used these extensively in deciding what actions to take. The sample below is a report on bookmarks and their usage. This chart alone enabled us to remove 30% of our bookmarks due to lack of use.

In analyzing the click activity on our corporate portal, the most impactful elements are:

Bookmarks	Are clicked on in 45% of all searches and significantly shortens the duration of a search session. We currently have ~1200 bookmarks making for quick discovery of the most commonly searched for content and tools around the company.
Topics	Are clicked on in 5-7% of all searches.
Connectors	Are clicked on in 4-5% of all searches.
Metadata	Good metadata typically moves an item from the bottom of the first page to the top half and from page 2 or later onto the bottom of page 1.

Additional details will be published in later blog posts. If of interest, details as to exactly what Microsoft search admin does in its regular administrative activities are described here.

Business Impact of Search

As shown in the preceding table, roughly half of all enterprise-level searches benefit from one of the search admin capabilities. Employees who receive such benefits average a one-minute faster search completion time than those whose searches don’t use those capabilities. Across 1.2 million monthly enterprise-level searches at Microsoft, that time savings amounts to more than 8,000 hours a month of direct employee-productivity benefit.

We achieve these results with an admin team of part-time individuals, investing a total of <300 hours per month doing direct search administration, responding to user requests to help find individual items, and maintaining a self-help site which advises employees on where and how to search best. We also have a larger improvement program striving to improve information discoverability across the company.

So 5 years into our improvement efforts, we have significantly improved user satisfaction, can now measure the productivity impact search is having, and built numerous partnerships across the company that are expected to continue yielding improvements in the years to come.

Lessons from this work is actively improving search has significant payback. The first step is to actively administer search, doing whatever helps the most popular searches to deliver the right results.

Graph Connectors on Teams Mobile Search

wbaer — Fri, 21 Oct 2022 11:02:57 GMT

We are excited to announce that we have now shipped capability for Teams Mobile iOS users to let users search their 3rd party enterprise content, powered by Graph Connectors! It is the first mobile experience to integrate Graph Connectors content into Microsoft search. Teams Mobile Android will follow soon.

Example: ServiceNow, Figma search results in Microsoft Teams mobile

Product value

Teams’ customers are now able to search for 3rd party content within Teams mobile app on the move, and easily leverage workplace search to complete workflows. This takes us further in our mission to empower users to find and collaborate with any workplace entities in Teams Mobile search, with no need to switch to or download different apps. Find whatever you need, collaborate wherever you are!

We believe that this capability will help increase the value of Teams as a M365 hub as well as enable easy Graph connector content access. This addition increases the value proposition of Microsoft Search with deep integration into widely used Microsoft Teams.

User experience

In addition to results from Teams activities, users will also be able to discover something new and useful, powered by Graph Connectors set up by tenant admins. Users can view the content within Teams and share it for collaboration instantly.

The Search verticals are the same as defined by tenant admins in the Admin Center for workplace search. The content renders with a default card layout. Please ensure to apply property labels (IconURL, LastModifiedDate, Description and Title) to your connection properties for best rendering experience.

We are starting with Graph Connector results in Search verticals and plan to bring Graph Connector results on 'All' vertical.

Microsoft Graph connectors

Microsoft Graph connectors allow you to bridge your disparate data sources into Microsoft 365, giving you access to what you need, wherever you’re working. Using Graph Connectors, you can bring in information from SaaS systems or on-prem file-shares or servers into Microsoft 365. By having all your content accessible in endpoints like SharePoint, Office.com, Bing.com and now Teams mobile, you reduce the overhead of context switching by keeping the information you need at your fingertips. Learn more about Graph Connectors here https://aka.ms/graphconnectors

Stemming in Microsoft Graph connector search results

wbaer — Fri, 21 Oct 2022 12:30:49 GMT

What's stemming?

Stemming in search means that a word is reduced to its word stem or root form. For example, ‘groups’ is reduced to ‘group’. We can then use both, the reduced form (group) and the original form (groups) to find relevant and matching documents. With stemming, users are more likely to find relevant content because search will find more and potentially relevant content.

For example: query terms “Window 11 supports” will also search for terms “Windows” and “support”.

The recently added stemming support enables expansion to and from, singular and plural word forms.

With stemming, users now get better quality results for their search queries. The results in “result cluster” experience in the All tab might however vary between plural and singular variants due to the relevance logic.

With this change we will support stemming for Graph Connectors in all the languages supported for SharePoint files. Reference: Linguistic search features in SharePoint Server - SharePoint Server | Microsoft Docs

Stemming is now available for both Graph Connector and SharePoint search results in all workplace search clients.

Bring Microsoft Search to where your users are

wbaer — Thu, 06 Oct 2022 15:57:45 GMT

Changing habits is tough, even a relatively simple habit like searching. Instead of training your users to create a new habit of going to Bing, SharePoint, or Office.com to search work, make it easier for them (and you) by bringing Microsoft Search to the sites and apps their teams are already using.

For example, maybe Sales team uses Salesforce to manage your customer data. By embedding workplace search into your Salesforce instead of leaving the app to find an internal file, bookmark, or person, they can start their search right there. Or maybe your product teams use Confluence to collaborate on projects. Embed search boxes on Confluence pages to make it faster and easier for those users to find info shared with them. You can also direct your users and teams to more targeted results by taking them to a custom search vertical when they use an embedded search box.

Not sure what an embedded search box is? It’s pretty straightforward. With just a short script, you can add a dedicated search box for workplace results to your line-of-business apps, mobile apps, and intranet sites and portals. When users start a search, they’ll get relevant, personalized suggestions and to see results, they always go to Microsoft Search in Bing. And no matter where you add an embedded search box, it always works exactly the same way.

Not sure why you’d want to use embedded search boxes? This approach offers some clear advantages:

Provides ubiquitous, trusted entry points to Microsoft Search
Leverages established work patterns to drive awareness and engagement with Microsoft Search
Creates a consistent search experience across your intranet sites, mobile apps, and line-of-business apps
Only search suggestions from your organization appear; web suggestions are never included
Always takes users to a Microsoft Search in Bing work results page, which excludes ads and web results

From listening to customers (and users) like you, we know that just making something available isn’t enough. We also have to make it easy—easy to implement, easy to maintain, and easy to use. Which is why we’ve tried to keep the process simple. See just how easy it is to add an embedded search box for different types of sites and apps below.

WordPress

Use a custom HTML widget to add the embedded search box script:

Confluence

Use an iframe widget and include parameters for URL, title, height, and width:

Salesforce

Create a Visualforce component and add it to your Salesforce homepage:

SharePoint (classic or modern)

Deploy the search box package from the Microsoft Search public to your app catalog and add it to your SharePoint sites:

We hope you find a lot of value in adding embedded search boxes. If you want to learn more, see Add a search box to your intranet site. If you have questions, comments, or feedback about adding or using an embedded search , share them with us at aka.ms/ESB.