Message from Sean Coleman - Chief Customer Officer, BA Insight
For those who attended Ignite last week, welcome home! For those who did not, the good news is that all of the great information shared is making its way to the entire Microsoft ecosystem. The only problem with that tends to be the confusion that can come after big announcements and the sometimes limited follow up info to clarify. In hope of helping, we’re sending this special edition of our customer newsletter to share what we know around search-related happenings from Ignite.
As always, I’m available to any of our customers to answer questions, discuss strategy, or just catch up on all the great things you all are accomplishing. Feel free to email me anytime at scoleman@bainsight.com.
Microsoft Search and Connectors: Demystified
Perhaps the biggest search-related announcement coming out of Ignite was the introduction of connectors for Microsoft Search. Here is a summary that should help clarify this announcement:
Search Connectors are third-party offerings. While Microsoft has built what we will call a “test bed” connector for ServiceNow (the connector only indexes knowledge bases and does not support security), all of the other connectors (including a production-ready ServiceNow connector) are offered through partners - BA insight being one of them.
Search Connectors are in preview. Right now, the capability is rolling out as a technology preview, with the official general availability expected around mid to late 2020. This preview is limited in scale (750,000 items per connection and a crawl rate of 4 documents per second) and scope (up to 12 connections, 64 properties per connection, a single entity type per connection). The API may also go through breaking changes between now and GA.
“In Bing” is just one way to get this data. Microsoft showed the Edge and Bing integration, which is called “Microsoft Search in Bing”. This is a packaged UI and delivery of organizational content within bing.com, but it is only one of the places that Microsoft Search will be made available. It’s not a requirement for the connectors or the delivery of Microsoft Search within your organization.
If you would like to see the connectors announcement, check out the keynote here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnUiJi4hts4 and fast forward to just past the 1 hour and 40 minute mark.
Microsoft Search: What to Expect
Beyond the connectors, Microsoft Search is an area with a lot going on and a lot of capabilities coming. We wanted to provide a few points around what you should expect, or at least understand, when it comes to Microsoft Search:
It is a singular “Service”. Don’t get confused by indexes, SharePoint, Exchange, and where all of the data will live. It’s not a single index. Rather, it’s a single service that wraps all of the Microsoft 365 components (Exchange, SharePoint, Teams, etc.) together and provides a single API to work with the data.
Microsoft Search powers the Modern Search experience in Microsoft 365. The Modern Search UI previously had no configuration options. However, it is opening up with the recent announcements. You can now let users search other systems such as Box or SAP from O365. These results show up in Modern Search as verticals (i.e. tabs in the UI allowing users to search these specific systems). You can configure how content from these verticals shows on screen via modern result types. Finally, you can also configure custom pages to show your results in case the modern search is too limiting for you. And next year you will gain more flexibility in how modern search pages are configured, including the ability to configure which refiners to show on verticals.
BA Insight is working closely with Microsoft. We’ve established key development level partnerships and working groups to help ensure that our customers’ requirements are communicated and understood by Microsoft. It’s a great partnership and one we expect to continue for the foreseeable future.
Here are some links to Ignite sessions that discuss these further:
Speakers: Nicolas Moreau, Microsoft; Mikael Svenson, Microsoft FAST; Kerem Yuceturk, Microsoft; Jyoti Pal, Microsoft
Project Cortex
In the first “new product” announcement for Microsoft 365 since Teams, Project Cortex made a good amount of noise. In general, Cortex appears to be an approach to knowledge management and knowledge centers, with AI technology as a key part of automating and delivering the content to users. It will be exciting to see where it goes from here, but there is a key point to understand when it comes to Cortex’s relationship to search. Any content ingested into Microsoft Search via third-party connectors (see info on that in the first section above) will be able to play a role inside of Cortex. This is exciting for sure, and it doubles down the importance of integrating non-Microsoft enterprise content into Microsoft Search through connectors.