Thanks to all of this integration, users will be able to search for emails, documents, people, and resources in an intuitive way. Simply typing ’emails from x with attachment,’ for example, will yield the right results and significantly speed up tasks. It should be especially useful for users who don’t remember where they saved a file – allowing them to search across all of the various platforms.
SharePoint Integration and Improvements
The functionality also extends to SharePoint, which is not only searchable from Windows, but has received improvements of its own. “Today we’re delighted to announce that search in SharePoint is becoming smarter and faster to use, and will surface more relevant results from across Office 365. Search results will be personalized for you by the Microsoft Graph,” Stated SharePoint Senior Product Manager Naomi Moneypenny. Microsoft Graph gleans insight from the people, sites and documents you work with, and ranks search results relevant to your needs. You’ll still be able to see all the results that satisfy your query, but personalized search will prioritize the results that are most likely to achieve your objective.” The team has also improved the search experience itself significantly. It’s easier to find and filter results and includes list items from everywhere rather than just the enterprise search center. Importantly, it’s faster for it, decreasing search times and leading to a smoother experience. Finally, Microsoft has announced the preview of its Bing for Business offering, which holds further improvements. “Bing for business uses Machine Reading Comprehension and Deep Learning to understand the intent of the question across all documents in your enterprise,” said Moneypenny. “And since it knows who you are based on your authentication session, it can synthesize the best answer for your specific query across all the documents you can access – from the public internet to your private intranet. Using both the AI of Bing and the intelligence of the Microsoft Graph, a search will extract and surface up tasks and approvals directly in the browser for action.” These experiences will roll out gradually ‘later this year’, and should be available in all geographies.