RAM POORNALINGAM: Welcome to the online session
on making Microsoft Search uniquely yours.
Hi, I'm Ram Poornalingam.
I'm a group program manager here at Microsoft.
ROSHAN DHERAM: Hi, I'm Roshan,
and I work as a product manager in Microsoft.
RAM POORNALINGAM: Together, we are going to
look at what it takes
to tailor Microsoft Search
to suit the needs of your organization.
So let's get started.
We will take a look at what is Microsoft Search
and talk about what you can customize,
but we'll spend most of the time doing some demos.
And finally, at the end of the deck,
we have a call to action for you.
So what is Microsoft Search?
It is an intelligent search solution
that not only enables you to search across M365 apps,
but also enables you to search across
all the apps in the organization,
through our investments in graph connectors.
Microsoft Search is ubiquitous.
It is available across many surfaces,
like Bing, Teams, Office, Windows, and many more.
Microsoft Search is actionable.
It empowers you to be more productive.
Microsoft Search is flexible,
which is the focus of this talk.
And Microsoft Search is trusted,
aligns to a high privacy and trust principles of M365.
Why customize?
The needs of organizations vary greatly.
For some customers,
their needs on the left end of the spectrum,
are met by the out of box Microsoft Search configuration.
It just works. They don't need to do anything.
Go to office.com and search for your organizational content.
For some organizations, they may want to tweak it a bit.
So your needs are somewhere in the middle of the spectrum,
you may configure bookmarks or acronyms.
However, we realize that there are organizations,
which have unique needs that can be only met
by providing them high degree of flexibility and control.
This session will focus on the topics
on this end of the spectrum.
So what can we customize?
Here on Microsoft Search SharePoint,
you can see that there are four constructs
that we can customize.
Let's take a look at them individually.
First is the verticals.
This is a way to collate related information together.
Here in this diagram, you would see a bunch of verticals,
the Files, People, and All are out of box verticals,
the remaining are custom verticals.
For the out of box verticals,
you can tweak them a little bit, like rename or disable.
You will get more greater flexibility in custom verticals.
The next construct is filters.
This enables you to narrow down the content you care about.
You might notice we have modified the design of filters.
This makes them more discoverable.
We also edit custom filters on any refinable property.
The next one is result types.
This allows you to customize the search page,
the cards on the search page.
You can add attributes like author, departments,
or you can completely change the layout of the card itself.
We have a designer that has a set of templates
that you can, that can meet most of your requirements.
You can either use the out of box templates
or you can take and customize them to your needs.
Or you can completely use a new template
that brand new template you can build from scratch.
And finally, result cluster.
This is the construct
that enables easy discovery of content in custom verticals.
And it comes somewhere on the top of your search page.
In this example, we show third party content,
Wiki content on the search page.
Like Microsoft Search, customization is also coherent
across multiple endpoints.
Up until now, we have seen
the experience of customizing in SharePoint.
If you look at now,
here is Microsoft Search customization in Office.
You will notice, it looks very much like SharePoint home.
And here is how it looks in bing.com.
Now we looked at what are the customization constructs
and where it shows up,
now, what content can you customize?
Actually, we can customize SharePoint
and connectors content.
The customization capabilities or features
are slightly different across these two content sources,
but over a period of time, they will converge.
Our goal is to provide you a familiar set of tools
that you can use across several customization user jobs.
Now, I'm going to hand it off to Roshan
to walk you through the demos.
ROSHAN DHERAM: Thanks, Ram.
Now let's look at a scenario
where customization of search page,
provides great value to users,
from the perspective of Megan.
Megan is from marketing department
of Contoso Pharmaceuticals.
She's trying to find the project details of COVID-19 vaccine
being developed by her R&D department
so that she can write a blog about it.
In Contoso Pharma, all the projects are stored
in respective line of business sites.
However, using Microsoft Search,
Megan can search across all these sites
from a single endpoint.
Let's take the endpoint of SharePoint home
and look at her experience,
after Victoria, who is Contoso's search administrator,
has customized the search page.
Megan types COVID 19 vaccine in search box
and lands on the All vertical.
Here, she finds a bunch of articles and Excel documents.
However, she's only interested in finding projects
from line of business sites
and navigates to the Project vertical.
This vertical shows all the projects across Contoso Pharma
for which Megan has view access.
As you can see, there are a bunch of projects
from marketing, sales, supply chain,
and distribution departments.
However, Megan wants to only find the projects
from research and development department,
which are in phase three clinical trials.
Let's look at how filters help Megan achieve her use case.
Megan navigates to the Filter section of the surf page,
clicks on Department filter,
and selects Research and Development.
She then goes to Status filter and selects Phase 3.
Now, she found the project which she needs
in a matter of seconds.
Let's look at behind the scenes,
on how Victoria has customized the search page
by adding new vertical and filters.
Microsoft Search can be configured and customized
for organization level in the M365 Admin Center.
We go to the Settings section, click on Microsoft Search,
go to Customizations and go in Verticals tab.
Here, we find, list of all the verticals
that are displayed on the search page.
You can edit it one of these existing verticals
or create new ones.
In our scenario, Victoria created a new custom vertical.
Let's look how it was done.
So I'm going to delete the project's vertical
and recreate it again, just to walk through the steps.
So you click on Add Vertical,
you enter the display name of the vertical.
This is exactly how the vertical is going to look
on the search page.
Then, you choose the content source.
Here you define from which source
you want to display your data.
In our scenario, we search SharePoint.
You can add tools using keyword query language
to further restrict the data
from the content source, previously selected.
In our scenario, we add the paths of line of business sites,
where projects are stored.
Let me quickly copy the path
of those particular sites,
which we have, in which we have the projects.
You can also add additional KQL,
using the managed properties of SharePoint.
Once you are done with the KQL, click on Next.
In this step, you can add custom filters to your verticals.
In our example, we are going to add three filters.
So the first one would be the Department filter.
What am I going to do over here
is select RefinableString00.
So, this refinable managed property in the background
is mapped to the metadata of site name.
So, if I select this particular refinable managed property,
I'll get to know from which site am I getting the result,
which in essence is the department for our case.
Then I choose whether it needs to be a single select
or a multiselect, and click on Done.
I repeat the same process
for creating the Status filter as well.
In this case, I've actually mapped it to RefinableString10.
In the backend, it maps to the system metadata of Status.
Again, I'm going to select
whether it should be a single select or multiselect,
and click on Done.
So you can also add filters
on a couple of predefined refinable managed properties.
You have a bunch of them to choose.
A typical example could be something like Author.
So let me go ahead and even create an Author filter.
Once you're done adding filters, click on Next.
Here, you have to review.
And once you're done with reviewing the vertical,
you can go ahead and create it.
You need to enable the vertical
for it to show up on the search page.
You can enable it now or come back to it later.
Done.
As you can see, we now have the project's vertical again,
at a talent level.
You can now see the vertical on the search page.
Since Microsoft is coherently available
across different endpoints,
you can see the same customizations applied in office.com.
In bing, we don't have filters as of now,
but they're coming very, very soon.
Till now, we had a look at
how you can customize the search page
for your whole organization,
but there is more you can do.
You can similarly customize the search page
for site collections as well,
by creating its own unique experience.
Let's look at a scenario,
where there's a dedicated site collection in Contoso Pharma
for storing product catalog files.
There aren't any news or sites in the site collection.
Hence,
Victoria wants to remove these verticals in the search page,
since they actually have zero results.
Let's look at how she can do this
in the SharePoint site settings.
You first go to the site, which you want to customize.
Go to Settings,
go to Site Settings.
In Microsoft Search, select Configure Search Settings.
As you see,
you have the same customization capabilities
you have seen in the M365 Admin Center,
however, any of these settings you apply over here
would be specific to this site.
So in our scenario, we want to disable all the verticals,
except the Files vertical.
So let me go on the All vertical.
Click on Edit.
You see that we have the same customizations
which you have seen at talent level,
and here I just go and disable it.
I repeat the same process for Sites and News.
Now at talent level, you can disable it directly
at the vertical itself,
but essentially this,
the capabilities are the same.
So as you can see, I've disabled all the verticals
except the Files vertical.
These verticals will no longer be available
on the site search page, till Victoria enables it again.
That's all we have for today's demo.
We do have a call to action for you.
The SharePoint Customization features we demoed
are currently in preview.
We request you to try out by signing up your organization,
using the link on the screen.
A quick summary of what we discussed
before we end the session.
We learned about how we can use Microsoft Search
across different content sources.
We saw how we can edit out of box verticals
and also create new custom verticals.
We saw how we can add custom filters
to any of these verticals.
We also learned that we can customize
how results from connectors are experienced by end users.
This customization will be available
for SharePoint content source soon.
We learned that through result cluster,
users can discover results across content sources
in a single place, that is the All vertical.
If you have other feedback,
please reach out to us at the email address on screen.
Thanks everyone, and have a good day.