For many of us, the launch of Microsoft Search – the company’s “intelligent search for the modern workplace” offering – might have passed under the radar. Last year, Microsoft combined Bing’s AI capabilities and visualisations powered by Microsoft Graph to come up with their very own enterprise search technology. It would be:
- Personalised – give you insights based on recently visited apps, websites, and files
- Microsoft native – integrating with Office, Outlook, One Drive, Bing, Teams, and more
- Private – surface insights from within your organisational network and not public pages
To be clear, Microsoft Search is already available across nearly every MS product you’re using and does not need any further activation or update. But if you want to zero in on the app’s standalone functionalities, decoupled from Teams and other productivity tools as much as possible, here are the steps:
- Open the Edge browser and make sure you are on the Bing search engine
- Look at the tabs just below the search query box. The WORK tab draws results from Microsoft Search
- Click on WORK and select your search location, like people, groups, internal websites, files, or conversations.
- Type in a search query and press enter
An admin would be able to populate Microsoft Search with common FAQs, like the company’s official address, time off policies, and so on. Search acts as both a knowledge centre for employees, as well as a retrieval tool for scattered information across the organisation.
Microsoft Ignite 2020 announced interesting updates to Search that could make the feature more widely recognised and finally take it to the mainstream. In fact, Search has its very own session at Ignite. Kathrine Hammervold and Robin Thomas from Microsoft take attendees through the company’s intended Microsoft Search roadmap, explaining how it will be weaved into the holistic Microsoft 360 experience – from SharePoint to Office, and from Teams to Edge, and beyond.
The availability of Search on Microsoft Teams will dramatically improve your information retrieval experience. Instead of typing in a hit-and-miss keyword, you will be able to conduct more targeted search activities by looking within the organisation’s employee records, private web assets, shared file repositories, and conversations you’ve had in the past.
All of this will be available on a completely redesigned search results page on Microsoft Teams. The feature’s artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities will surface only those results most relevant to your unique context, cutting down search timelines.
Microsoft Search has incredible potential and is sure to boost your productivity on Teams. Right now, the average worker spends 19.8% of their work hours – that is nearly one entire day per week – on looking up information! WFH and the fact that you cannot step over to a co–worker’s cubicle for help only exacerbates the problem. The consolidated, contextualised capabilities of Microsoft Search on Teams could be exactly what we need to solve this issue.
The update is scheduled to roll out by the end of 2020. Watch this space for more details.
