Find what you want, discover what you need with personalized intelligent search across Microsoft 365
We're putting you at the center of everything - intelligent, personalized search across Microsoft 365 helps you be more productive and build on the work of others. From Windows to web, search meets you, wherever you are.What’s new for Microsoft Search – Ignite 2020 Edition
Posted at aka.ms/MicrosoftSearch/Ignite2020 Haven't had a chance to catch up or missed our sessions? Don’t worry, we’ll precap and recap all of the latest news and announcements for Microsoft Search here. Looking for our sessions? Visit https://aka.ms/MicrosoftSearch/Ignite2020/LearnMore. Click here to jump ahead. On the go? You can download this post as a .pdf at https://aka.ms/MicrosoftSearch/Ignite2020/DownloadBlog. NOTE Unless otherwise noted, features and capabilities will be available in H2 CY20. Have you ever misplaced something? Maybe it was your car keys, your favorite jewelry, or something else… The typical process you go through is probably something like this – you ask yourself the question, “where did I put my keys” and then walk backward from where you last went, which rooms you were last in, the last you did perhaps.. That process is synonymous with a traditional search experience, a query and continuous refining of the query until you find what you were looking for – while this process may work for you on one occasion, it’s not consistent enough to be valuable in the future, and what if the keys you’re looking for, aren’t the ones you misplaced, but those of a roommate, partner, or someone else? This is why search needs to evolve, to become more personal, more context aware, more precise, and more available, so wherever you are, whatever it is, you can find it the first time, with minimal effort, and precision. Microsoft Search is the evolution of search, smarter search to help you stay in touch with what’s important and trending around you in Microsoft 365 and your connected systems. Today we announced several new capabilities coming to Microsoft Search in the next few months to make search more intelligent, more productive, and more precise. New Search Features People-centric search Microsoft Search has always put people first and at the center of search… usually when you’re searching for information, you work from its edges to its center, in the same way we may build a puzzle. The strength of Microsoft Search is that it allows you to find that information from the center, the person, outward. It’s people who create and curate knowledge, and we believe that allowing you to anchor on that person, their knowledge, and solve the information puzzle working outward, delivers greater precision, and a more delightful experience – because sometimes the answer you’re looking for isn’t found through a document, it’s found through a person. People centric search allows you to scope and refine your searches, precisely, to an individual to allow you to harness your organizations collective knowledge. Find skills and expertise In the same way we allow you to find what you need through individual knowledge, we are expanding that experience to allow you to not only find information, but also insights and expertise. The ability to find skills and expertise lets you home in on the individual talent in your organization to find the experts that can best help you solve a problem or complete a task. For example, for a marketing campaign, you may want to know who in your company has expertise in social media or perhaps event production. With Microsoft Search, you’ll simply be able to ask, “who knows about social media” or “experts in event production”. Using our machine learning algorithms, Microsoft Search can identify expertise, not only based on self-attestation – or adding skills to your own profile, but also through content understanding, through reasoning over email and documents to identify areas of expertise a person may possess based on collaborative patterns and then suggest to that person to add those discoveries to their profile. This helps keep up to date the evolving nature of knowledge of the individuals in your organization. Power BI search Power BI is the Magic Quadrant Leader among analytics and business intelligence platforms and over 200,000 customers around the world use Power BI and bring 40 petabytes of data into Power BI every month and now we’re making it easier to find Power BI artifacts such as reports and dashboards, by expanding the ability to search across these artifacts in SharePoint and Office.com in addition to Bing. -Source https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-named-a-leader-in-gartners-2020-magic-quadrant-for-analytics-and-bi-platforms/ Conversation search Everywhere we look and everywhere we work, we’ll find information – and sometimes this can be overwhelming when we’re trying to put it all into context. Now we’re making it easier to find what you need, across the apps and services you’re using, where you’re working by surfacing Teams, Yammer, and Outlook conversation results in SharePoint and Office.com through a new Conversations vertical to make it easier for you to search once, across all of your organizations information. Image search Leonardo da Vinci wrote that a poet would be "overcome by sleep and hunger before [being able to] describe with words what a painter is able to [depict] in an instant." Now in Microsoft Search across SharePoint and Office.com you’ll be able to precisely find what a painter is able to depict in an instant with new image search. Improved filter design and new filters New out of the box filters will make it easier to find what you need, whether a file, presentation, page, or something else in addition to precisely searching for the most up-to-date . And stay tuned for being able to use your own filters based on the refineable managed properties in the coming months. Topic search Finding information is awesome, organizing that information is even better. Topic answers will come later this calendar year as part of Project Cortex. Project Cortex topics uses AI to identify knowledge topics across teams and systems, and automatically organize related resources and experts to create topic pages--like Wikipedia pages for the enterprise, built by AI. Topics bring together people, content, and information and have a name, definition, description and connections to people, content (e.g. files and sites) and conversations. Topics are automatically mined from content and curated by end-users. Topics can also be created manually. Personal query history Search is something we use every day, a lot, and it’s hard to keep track of what you last searched for now you’ll no longer need to search for what you’ve searched for adding a new option to view and manage your personal query history. With personal query history, you'll see your recent queries as you begin typing in the search box to help you get back to insights and information you recently used or accessed so you'll no longer have to bookmark your queries or memorize the right query to get you back to where you were. Your personal query history can be managed through your Office 365 My Account settings and new My Account privacy controls allow you to delete your query history or download your query history for future reference. New and improved answers in Microsoft Search Acronym answers Did you know the world's longest acronym, according to the Guinness Book of World Records is NIIOMTPLABOPARMBETZHELBETRABSBOMONIMONKONOTDTEKHSTROMONT? Often, we come across unfamiliar acronyms at work. Sometimes, these terms could even mean specific to different teams, projects, or organizations. Finding the meaning of acronyms at work is now easier than ever using natural language queries across Microsoft 365 apps and services. For example, you can query ‘Define DNN’, ‘What is DNN’, ‘Meaning of DNN’ etc. to see all the definitions of DNN used within your organization. Definitions are both mined from the content you have access to and curated by your organizations, Microsoft 365 administrator. Acronyms answers are currently available in SharePoint and Office.com (in English) in addition to Bing.com (in English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, and Italian) and soon in Outlook web, Outlook mobile, Teams mobile, Office apps like Word, Excel and PowerPoint in English and additional languages. Calendar answers Wondering when is your next product meeting or your next meeting with a colleague while you are on-the- go? Forget scrolling through your phone’s calendar to find it. You can now use voice or type in the search box and find your meetings in your favorite Outlook mobile app! Want to forward a meeting to a colleague or reply to an invite with meeting notes? Forget navigating to calendar and browsing through it to find the meeting. You can now search for it right in your inbox without switching views on your large screen Outlook clients! We have been working to make it easy and natural for you to find your events. No more scrolling or browsing required! You can look for a meeting/event with its <title>–, <attendee name> or <time of the meeting>. You can RSVP to the meeting, send emails or join a Teams meeting right from the answer! The calendar answer is available for enterprise users on in the US market and is soon going to be available on Outlook on the web, Outlook for Windows and Outlook for Android with support for Microsoft Accounts and other markets. File answers Search through your piles of files in Outlook just the way you think! Our data suggests that a quarter of search sessions in Outlook end in users opening an attachment or a link in the email. You can now search for files using natural syntax containing file name, author of the file, sender of the email that contains a file or just the file type across attachments you’ve received in addition to files someone shared with you on a Teams chat or your files in OneDrive For Business and SharePoint. Files answers will initially be available on and Outlook on the web in the US market with fast follow in other Outlook clients and other markets. Making the most of Microsoft Search Microsoft Search provides a robust set of tools you can use to make search work better for your organization and now we’re expanding the options available to you and your organization. Are your employees finding what they need? Is search working for you? Over the next several weeks we will begin rolling out new administrative features to help you answer these questions with a new feedback loop and improved search analytics. Admin feedback One of the most common asks for Microsoft Search is to help keep its users engaged through understanding the value of results or a person’s individual search success rate. The new feedback feature in Microsoft Search allows your employees to securely provide feedback to you, the search administrator, on the quality of their search results, suggest answers, and be a partner in the lifecycle of search in your organization. Analytics Tenant Analytics give you the tools and insights to make search great for your company. A new Microsoft Search Insights dashboard will help admins keep employees productive with insights into what they're searching for. See top search queries run on Microsoft Search, along with an impression distribution over time for various answers. Making search uniquely yours Search works best when you can personalize it to suit your unique needs. Over the next several months, we will begin gradually allowing for greater customization of the search experience with Microsoft Search to include custom verticals and filters. You’ll be able to edit out-of-box verticals or create your own, change the way results look and add your own filters based on refinable managed properties. In addition, a layout designer will make it even more simple to create compelling views of connector content via Adaptive Cards. Search wherever you are working Last month we began making Microsoft Search available to more apps and services in Microsoft 365 to include contextual search in Microsoft Teams and now, Microsoft Search in Windows, Outlook, and more improvements in Teams and we’re building on that work to bring Microsoft Search to more Microsoft 365 apps and services. Microsoft Teams As your organization’s use of Teams grows, so does content stored in teams, giving you a rich breadth and history of messages, files, meeting content and other organization knowledge to draw on. Earlier this year we rolled out improved autosuggest results and the ability to get contextual search results in your channels or chats using CTRL + F as you enter your search terms and recently we enabled contextual search from mobile as well. The new full page immersive search results page experience in Teams will deliver on the vision to help you achieve more by finding content faster and more reliably. The experience is optimized for recognition and users will be presented with better relevance and context in the results. Filters are also easier to access allowing people to find exactly what they are looking for. We will also be bringing the power of Microsoft Search into Teams by introducing answers mined from your organization knowledge which will help users get their job done faster. Outlook Searching is the second most popular activity behind email, and over the next several months we’ll be bringing new search innovation to help you find and discover with more accuracy, in less time. We recognize the best search experiences are those that speak your language, can understand ambiguities, and deliver the most confident results where and when you need them. Outlook supports Microsoft Search that recognizes search queries using language you use every day to filter and narrow search results through either typing or speaking via a new microphone option in the search bar. Searching for something specific about a contact will provide an actionable result such as "John's phone number". Search for a specific contact will use Microsoft Search services to provide relevant and actionable results rather than keywords from information from your email and calendar. In addition, real-time updates in travel reminders, powered by Bing and more in the reminder card. Windows Microsoft Search is designed to meet you wherever your working, and now your desktop. Coming soon to Windows 10, when logged in with a Work Account you’ll be able to search across your local and organizational content right from the Windows search box. Microsoft Office Office is with you everywhere you go, on mobile, in the browser and on your desktop. Microsoft Search has been a part of Office.com for some time already for enterprise users, making it super simple to find apps, get back to files and access all the knowledge in the enterprise from in one place. Now the familiar Microsoft Search experience has also come to consumer Office.com. Now we’re bringing Microsoft Search to your favorite productivity apps you use every day in Microsoft 365. When you’re using Word, Excel or PowerPoint, the familiar Microsoft search box is at the top of the app, helping you be productive, and taking advantage of the knowledge of your organization and the web to help be more productive. How often have you had to dig through a document to find something because the document didn't use the exact words you had searched for? With the recent breakthroughs in deep learning techniques, you can now go beyond the common search term-based queries and get answers to your questions based on the document content, opening a whole new way of finding knowledge. For example, when you’re looking at a water quality report, you can easily answer questions like where does the city water originate from? How to reduce the amount of lead in water? By bringing the well-established web search technologies such as query and document understanding, and indexing, and adding deep learning based natural language models, we can now handle a much broader set of search queries beyond “exact match.” On mobile, the Office app let’s you find all your files and work on PowerPoint, Word and Excel without switching apps. When you’re on the go the app also lets you perform common tasks such as scanning QR codes, signing PDFs or transforming pictures into editable Word and Excel documents. Connecting your businesses' islands of information Not only is the amount of information growing at exponential rates, but it is increasingly distributed – from on-premises to cloud applications. Today we announced that Microsoft Graph connectors for Microsoft Search will be generally available later this year and the expansion of our robust ecosystem to include partners Box, Adobe, Cognizant, Go1, LumApps, Accenture, Raytion, Cognizant, and BA Insight. With Microsoft Graph connectors, you can connect disparate systems whether on-premises or in the cloud so you can find information, in context, where you’re working. Along with new Microsoft Graph connectors, we’re also working hard to make Microsoft Search more integrated across Microsoft products to include Microsoft Azure. Upcoming Microsoft Azure integration will create a ‘boundaryless’ cohesive and coherent search experience, Microsoft Search will be able to display query results from existing Azure Cognitive Search indices, such as those powering mobile, web, and custom line-of-business applications. A new way to take advantage of Microsoft Search Lastly, for customers who may not have an Office 365 subscription, we’re pleased to announce a new standalone Microsoft Search service so you can help your employees find information quickly and precisely. Microsoft Search brings the best of intelligent product search to your organization, now whether integrated with Microsoft 365 or used as our new standalone service you can connect to all your applications and data platforms. To learn more or nominate your organization for our private preview visit https://aka.ms/msftsearchstandalone. New and improved developer experiences In addition to our progress with Microsoft Graph connectors, we also released some new features and capabilities in the Microsoft Search API in the Microsoft Graph. We've heard your feedback that some key features for SharePoint developers were lagging behind. A new video will walk you thru the API surface, and you can jump here to see the September 2020 additions. Here's what we've added in our latest release : The following SharePoint types are now addressable by the API : List, ListItem, Sites, and Drives. You can scope queries in entityType property in the searchRequest, and the response will contain search results casted to the appropriate type. We've added support for custom Sort on any sortable property for SharePoint and OneDrive We've added support for aggregation (aka Refiners in the SharePoint world) to enable you to build user experience where users can filter results. We now fully support selectProperties so that you can trim down the requested properties, or get more managed properties from the search index For Graph Connectors, we support passing multiple connections in the request. Search results will be sorted by relevance. Note that we decided to do a few breaking changes in the API, and you will have to update your app before the end of 2020. In the meantime, we will support both schemas to enable you to transition smoothly. Ahead of us, we will be releasing the API in /1.0 before the end of 2020 so that you can use it in your applications in Production and be fully supported. We are still working on our plans for what is news in the Search API in Graph, but we have bold ambitions for the coming year. Keep up-to-date with the latest Microsoft Search innovation by bookmarking our roadmap at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?rtc=1&filters=Microsoft%20Search.Take Microsoft Search further with Microsoft Graph connectors
At Ignite last year in Orlando, we shared our progress and continued innovation for personalized, contextual search across Microsoft 365, to bring intelligent search and discovery experiences directly to you – where you’re already working, surfacing people, information, and insights across Microsoft 365 and connected systems with our Microsoft Graph connectors. We recognize that organizations have a wealth of data in other third-party services and applications. Boundary-less search is only as good as the sources it has access to. Expanding Preview to Targeted Release Customers Today, we’re delighted to announce that we are expanding the preview of connectors to all customers in Targeted Release. Over the next few weeks, any customer who has selected the Targeted Release option will be able to start trying connector functionality. Once rolled out to your tenant, you will be able to see the Connectors tab on Microsoft 365 admin center > Settings > Microsoft Search page. With over 130 connectors available, we have received very strong customer interest since we started the preview last November. Thank you for providing us with your feedback during the past several months. We have made many bug fixes and added new features based on your input. New Preview Connectors & Features We will be rolling out 2 new connectors and several new features to all our preview customers over the next couple of months. In addition to the 6 Microsoft-built connectors, we are adding 2 new connectors – Azure SQL and Azure DevOps. Administrators will be able to select which connectors they wish to use for their organizations based on which investments they’ve already made in third-party applications. Further extensibility with APIs will also be possible. Organizations will be able customize the search sources and the display of search results with custom refiners and verticals, and control the display of how sources of information look in result pages. In addition to bringing new connectors to Microsoft Search, we’re continuously building on our connector platform to enable you to create rich new scenarios through the information in your connected systems. Enhanced Connectors Search Experiences We have enhanced the search experience with core features like refiners support, alias support, and search result snippet. Any connector data can take advantage of Adaptive Cards to create rich result type UX on the search result page. Ranking and relevance has been improved to help you find what you are looking for faster. Improved Administrative Experiences The administrative experience for Microsoft Graph connectors has been improved to help you better understand your connector index usage and to provide a more consistent experience across Microsoft-built connectors and third-party connectors. Improved Developer Experiences The Graph connector platform provides open APIs for you to develop connectors for any data source you choose. The indexing API is now unified around a single externalItem entity type to provide a simplified developer experience. The API has been enhanced to support a new labels feature to let you define the semantics of your properties so the indexed data can be participate in richer search and Graph experiences. What’s Next? As we head towards general availability, we will continue to listen to your feedback to enhance Microsoft Search and Graph connectors. We are targeting to have Graph connectors reach general availability this year, and we look forward to sharing more with you at Ignite 2020. We will continue to work with our partners to ensure wherever your data resides, you can bring it to Microsoft 365, delivering search experiences across the apps and services you use everyday. You can learn more about Microsoft Graph connectors at https://aka.ms/MicrosoftSearch/Connectors.
New Answer Analytics in Microsoft Search Usage Reports
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.Design your Microsoft Search learning experience at Microsoft Ignite
Get the latest roadmap and vision for Microsoft Search, new development opportunities, and new ways to connect Microsoft Search to your world of information outside of Microsoft 365. Recommended Sessions Subscribe to the Microsoft Search Learning Path at Microsoft Ignite and get access to all of the latest Microsoft Search news, announcements, and learning opportunities. Learning Paths provide a unique opportunity to follow a series of modules designed to provide an end-to-end learning experience for your topics of choice. You can learn more about the Microsoft Search Learning Path at https://myignite.techcommunity.microsoft.com/learning-paths/83231. Learning Path modules for Microsoft Search include: SRCH10 What's new and next for Microsoft search Get the latest updates on Microsoft Search. Come on the journey to learn how insights, actions, and answers are being built into your everyday experiences across Microsoft 365, Bing, and Edge. See the latest roadmap across all of your experiences, from SharePoint to Office and beyond. In addition, get insights on how to connect external third-party content connectors, customization, and extensibility. SRCH20 Microsoft Search for the administrator: What you need to know Learn about the impact of Microsoft Search on you, the administrator. We’ll take you through the inner workings of Microsoft Search and pull back the curtains on the architecture. Then we’ll translate that into practical tasks for search administration that will help you and your organization get the most out of Microsoft Search. SRCH30 Connect your world of information to Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Search: A sneak peek at Micr... Modern information workers need to find knowledge quickly and easily regardless of where the data resides. Come take a first look at Microsoft Graph Connectors, which will enable users in your enterprise to search over content sources beyond Microsoft 365. You will see how Microsoft and our partners are jointly making Microsoft Search more powerful to benefit your users. We will also show you a simple set of APIs that you can start using for your custom connector development. SRCH40 Get answers in context with semantic search and natural language in Microsoft search For human beings, reading comprehension is a basic task, performed daily. As early as in elementary school, we can read an article, 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. In search applications, 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 articles that usually cover narrow and specific domains, where the search data that algorithms depend upon is sparse. In this session, see and learn about the latest innovation with natural language and machine reading comprehension in Microsoft Search. SRCH50 What's new and next for Microsoft Search customization and development Microsoft Search is an intelligent, enterprise search experience from Microsoft that applies the artificial intelligence technology (AI) from Bing and deep personalized insights surfaced by the Microsoft Graph, to make search more effective for you. In this session, we demonstrate new Graph APIs and how Microsoft Search will let you create and customize rich search experiences around all of your enterprise content, regardless of where it resides. See our roadmap and examples of how to modernize your existing SharePoint-based enterprise search experiences to take full advantage of Microsoft Search. In addition to the Learning Path sessions above, we also have several great sessions to immersive yourself deeper into new Microsoft Search experiences, see the latest innovation in demo-centric theater sessions and more… Related Sessions BRK2022 Get started with Microsoft Search in Bing and Edge Microsoft Search in Bing is a new search offering that helps you save time by bringing you the best of the web and work in a single experience. In this session learn how to make the most of world and work information, get tips and tricks on best practices, see demos of what’s new and what’s coming, and learn about the roadmap for Microsoft Search in Bing and Edge. BRK2034 What’s new and what’s next: AI-powered experiences in Microsoft 365 Microsoft 365 uses AI to help employees overcome some of the realities of modern work, including increasing time demands, overwhelming amounts of data, and growing security threats. Learn what's new and what's coming with AI in Microsoft 365 and how to strategically apply AI in your organization, shape your AI strategy, foster an AI culture, and implement AI responsibility. THR3010 Getting started with out-of-box Microsoft Graph Connectors for Microsoft Search Microsoft Graph Connectors let you connect to external data sources to make them searchable from Microsoft Search. Come take a look at how a search admin can easily set up some out-of-box connectors to popular data sources and enable information workers to search over them from various Microsoft Search endpoints. THR3019 Get answers in context with conversational AI and natural language in Microsoft Search For human beings, reading comprehension is a basic task, performed daily. As early as in elementary school, we can read an article, 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. In search applications, 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 articles that usually cover narrow and specific domains, where the search data that algorithms depend upon is sparse. In this session, see and learn about the latest innovation with natural language and machine reading comprehension in Microsoft Search. THR4000 Hands on with the new Microsoft Search API in the Microsoft Graph Learn how to connect your world of information with Microsoft Search with the new Microsoft Search public API in the Microsoft Graph. In this session, learn how to integrate results from Microsoft Search into your own applications, programmatic access to search, and how to build a tailored search experience through guidance, demos, and more. THR2023 Introducing intelligent new people experiences powered by Microsoft and LinkedIn graphs Join us to learn more about how we are reimagining people/profile experiences across Office 365 by harnessing the rich data and signals available across Microsoft and LinkedIn graphs. We announce new capabilities that can suggest projects, topics that you can choose to highlight in your profile, and help you get discovered for your expertise through Microsoft Search. We also walk through new timely and contextual nudges/highlights from LinkedIn and MyAnalytics to help you complete tasks and stay informed on important updates from your colleagues and share improvements being made available to help with profile field extensibility scenarios. Still have questions? You can meet with the Microsoft Search team at Microsoft Ignite! Meet with the Microsoft Search Team We're very excited about our presence at Ignite this year as we have A LOT to announce! As such, we anticipate you might want to meet with us to go deeper than what we might cover in our sessions. With that said, we're pleased to offer side meeting opportunities to our customers and partners. If you would like to have a side meeting with our team, please fill out the request form at https://aka.ms/meetsearch so your nomination can be considered. Do this soon as schedules will fill fast! Finally, we’re always here to answer your questions whether you’re attending Ignite or not. Follow us on Twitter @MicrosoftSearch or visit the Microsoft Search Resource Center at https://aka.ms/MicrosoftSearch or if you're in Orlando, visit one of our Microsoft Search booths in the Microsoft Showcase and pick up some search swag while you're there. We’ll “find” you in Orlando ‘-)Help people be their best remote self with search in Microsoft 365
In these challenging times we don't have the luxury of quick hallway conversations or brief exchanges in the break room. While those interactions may have seemed unimportant at the time, many of them led to getting work done—whether it was just to remind someone about feedback they needed on a document they shared earlier in the day or to ask a co-worker about a new acronym they heard in a meeting. If you're working in Microsoft 365, you can still help your employees find important info without face-to-face interactions. Microsoft Search in Microsoft 365 connects you and your data across apps and services delivering personalized, contextually relevant information when you need it, no matter where you're working. You can find Microsoft Search in apps such as Outlook, Office, SharePoint, Delve, and more. Just click in the search box and you'll immediately see information about people, files, and conversations to help you work more efficiently. Another way you can find work results is by searching on Bing. Bing brings all of the features of Microsoft Search to the place you’re already using—your browser. Power up a second screen We know multitasking has become even more critical in these rapidly changing times. Many employees are working from home on a laptop and are using their mobile phone as a second screen. When you don’t want to shift focus away from what you’re trying to get done, but you need info from work, use Microsoft Search in Bing as a secure way to search, access files, and more. Just sign in to your work account on Bing on any device for work results wherever you are. See updates at a glance It’s more important than ever for your users to be able to see what’s happened recently. In SharePoint you can use the Highlighted content web part to dynamically display content from a document library, a site, a site collection, or all sites to aid in information discovery—it will show your most recent documents by default. Because your users don’t need to switch apps, they’ll never lose context and can quickly get back to important documents or news. Learn more about the Highlighted content web part at https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Use-the-Highlighted-content-web-part-e34199b0-ff1a-47fb-8f4d-dbcaed329efd. Like SharePoint, Office.com and OneDrive also have info to help you discover what’s been shared with you recently, what you’ve been working on, recommendations based on your work trends, and info that’s trending to help you get back to work faster. Stay in the know with Discover On Delve, OneDrive, and Office.com, you can also use the Discover view to quickly review relevant documents from within your organization that have been shared with you, discover what’s trending, and see popular content you have access to. Connect to the info you need now Top of mind for many companies is making sure they are sharing information with employees about Covid-19 and working from home. Bookmarks in Microsoft Search allow you to promote a site or location that may be useful in answering a person’s question. For example, perhaps you want to promote info about connecting to your network remotely or changes to the time off policy. A bookmark allows people to quickly access this info seamlessly. Learn more about Bookmarks at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftsearch/manage-bookmarks. Communicate important info People have a lot of questions—especially right now. Q&A’s in Microsoft Search allow you to provide answers to those questions instead of just providing links. For example, you can display answers to commonly asked questions such as “how do I reset my password.” And you can use easily customizable HTML to make answers look just right. You can learn more about Q&A’s at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftsearch/manage-qas. Another area where users may have no context is acronyms. They are common across businesses, but with fewer hallway conversations, it’s hard to find out what they mean. Using search in Microsoft 365 you can quickly create and curate acronyms specific to your organization. When someone searches for an acronym, they’ll see an answer that tells them what it means—no hallway convos required. Learn more about acronym answers at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftsearch/manage-acronyms. Collaborate from afar People are the heart of your business. With search in Microsoft 365 you can quickly search for a person by their name or details you know about them, like “Adele in London” or “John in Building 13.” Then you can check out their profile, org chart, free/busy info, and even find files they’ve shared with you to make working together when you’re apart easier. Need more info? Check out the latest documentation at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftsearch/overview-microsoft-search and visit https://aka.ms/MicrosoftSearch to download free adoption materials, usage guides, and more to help get your business up and running with Microsoft Search.
