Microsoft Search, particularly when effort is put in to build metadata and Organizational Information is an extremely useful tool that doesn’t always get the credit it deserves (probably partially stemming from the consumer experience with ‘bing’ over the years).

Organizations can leverage Microsoft Search to help their users locate information extremely quickly and efficiently – Providing the right change management and training plans have been put in place to help change user behavior.

Microsoft have recently made available a host of cool admin tools to assist with configuring Microsoft Search to give users the best experience. Features like the Graph Connectors for Microsoft Search unlock a host of possibilities for extending Microsoft Search outside of just Microsoft 365.

An even easier method of enriching the Search experience is to add some organization data in the Microsoft 365 Admin Portal. In the below screenshots, we have added a few options into the Microsoft Search config:

An Acronym:

A bookmark:

A Q&A entry:

We can even enhance some of our options by linking to PowerApps, external sites and scoping the results to specific user groups.

Our users can then search within Office 365 and find our predefined results:

That’s really cool, our users can search in the Office Portal but it could probably be fancier. This is where Edge (Chromium) comes into play. The built in Microsoft Search functionality allows these result to surface as part of a regular web search:

Once the user is signed into Edge with their corporate account they will see the “Work” option in their search results. The search functionality can be used to search our entire organizations Microsoft 365 data including any Graph connectors to external systems and can even be triggered from Windows 10 machines local search bar. This is an extremely powerful tool for users to navigate very quickly and find the answers they need.