Author: Jonathan Stuckey
SharePoint Online modern search experience has been the poor cousin of SharePoint and 365 services for years. I have reported on minor updates, tweaks and and re-releasing old functionality re-badged as new for many years. Finally, recent changes with the completion of merging Microsoft Search and the SharePoint Online UI has now reached unification across the main channels including Microsoft Teams, and OneDrive on the desktop. Finally, the story makes sense.
In June 2022 Microsoft brought back a basic set of configuration for "Verticals" (see my other search articles). These enhancements with IA, metadata and structure were welcome, but as usual because they were missing key functionality and the pre-requisites needed specialists to set it up properly the result was the usual 'Yay... ahhh not again" .
Well now after 24-months of integrating functionality, with extensions to Microsoft Graph integration, AI enhancements for predictive search and referencing, and completing extending into all common result-sources across 365 and beyond (without a crow-bar and code) - Microsoft has brought this all together with a unified UX.
Now I know some of this is really smoke-n-mirrors, even being as crass as jamming the UI in via iframes in Microsoft Teams and needing the "connector" (read: Viva Connections) to get this unified end-user search experience, but regardless of how we finally got there - it has finally - got there.
Now some of the really nice things we get are thanks to the AI enablement in search, thanks to the ubiquitous "Copilot" integration and forced-march of the brand, and ultimately 90% of the leg-work for Generative AI, LLM development and content ingestion is based on search crawling and indexed relationships (yes I know its a massive over-simplification)
What we have is:
multiple content sources contributing content - including messaging, rich-media, streamed content as well as documents
integration between Verticals (read: content sources) with persistence of search query between them as you toggle
extended filtering options with common options on source, site added
context based filtering depending on content type being presented (images, video, data-sets)
continued support for your own business classification metadata.
...what we are missing is the flexibility on presentation style in the card designer, as you still need to be a developer to make the cards show anything more useful thank the default summary extract and thumbnail picture on right or left of the card. But the integration required to provide full-support for Copilot's generative AI services has been a real boon.
Thank you who ever finally realised you needed to have the Search stuff work in a reasonable and consistent manner - and then went a gave the product groups the nudge with a size-9.
What this does promote is the need to make sure your content is:
clean and up to date
appropriately secured
preferably labelled or referenced across environment
Future articles, I hope, will give me a chance to cover off how we enhance the look-n-feel of presentation, and make content surfaced in Search and Copilot appropriate - because its all related now.
About the author: Jonathan Stuckey
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