Microsoft Search is an intelligent, enterprise search experience across Office 365. This search not yet includes all the apps but according to Microsoft road map this will be available in more and more apps across Microsoft 365.
- Microsoft search is “personal” – this means you will able to see only those content which either you are the owner or shared with you
- For a keyword when you are searching, it will search from SharePoint, OneDrive, Groups, People, Teams – from all the connected services. Not only this when in Bing, it will search within the organization + public web results.
- Microsoft Search is relevant in the context of the app. Like when searching from Outlook it will search from outlook mails only not from the entire SharePoint.
How does the Microsoft Search works in Bing?
How to Configure
Go to https://www.bing.com/business/explore, sign in as Admin.
In the Admin portal, turn on Microsoft search. Configure the connected services and user permissions.
Now once Microsoft Search via Bing for Business is configured, this allows you to search across your mails, OneDrive, SharePoint sites mostly all the Office apps including Microsoft Teams chats and Yammer Conversations. But till now it does not search through Stream even if the channel is connected with Office 365 group. This is an unified search experience where without switching between application you can search through almost all you apps, as a starting point for Search, this is really a good experience.
Search
Next after adding the bing extension in your chrome browser, if you seach for a keyword , like here I am searching for “Ladakh” (where I went recently 😊) it will show a result like this:
Where I can see
- Bookmarks
- SharePoint Sites
- Files from SharePoint
- Files from OneDrive
- Teams conversation
- Public web search result
- This is as awesome experience where MS Teams conversation and SharePoint files are with public web results.
Conclusion
What extra we are getting from Microsoft Search?
- Once configured, MS Search is also available from any Microsoft search box. And as we already discussed search result contains result set from the entire Microsoft 365
- Personalized – do not need to worry about permissions, Microsoft search does not change any permission, this is why result set can vary from user to user based on their permission.
- Bookmarks – Admin can create Bookmarks with several keywords and those are also available to the users in the search result.
- Choose the app from Admin center
- Customize you search in your Organization
Overall this is a good experience to get the result set from all Apps in a single place.
