Microsoft 365 & SharePoint Community (PnP) – September 2020 update

by Scott Muniz | Sep 10, 2020 | Uncategorized

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Microsoft 365 & SharePoint Ecosystem (PnP) September 2020 update is out with a summary of the latest guidance, samples, and solutions from Microsoft or from the community for the community. This article is a summary of all the different areas and topics around the community work we do around Microsoft 365 and SharePoint ecosystem during the past month.

Thank you for being part of this initiative. Sharing is caring!

• Microsoft 365 / SharePoint Community (PnP) – September 2020 update

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Microsoft Search at Ignite 2020

by Scott Muniz | Sep 10, 2020 | Uncategorized

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

With less than two weeks until Microsoft Ignite 2020, our Microsoft Search speakers are firing on all cylinders to finalize their sessions for this year’s conference. And while the Ignite session catalog is live at https://myignite.microsoft.com, choosing from hundreds of sessions can take some time even for the veteran attendee. But have no fear, we are here to help! If you’re passionate about Microsoft Search here are the recommended sessions to get you started.

Roadmap, News, and Announcements

Enabling collaboration, communication, and knowledge sharing with Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Project Cortex, and more

Organizations are moving to a hybrid workplace to support the needs of remote and onsite employees. In the 2nd part of a 2-part series, we look at how teams can collaborate fluidly with the latest innovations across Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive. We also look at how organizations can improve employee engagement, communications, and knowledge sharing through SharePoint, Yammer, and Project Cortex. – Jeff Teper

What’s new and what’s next for Microsoft Search

Get the latest updates on Microsoft Search. Come on the journey to learn how insights, actions, and answers are being built into your everyday experiences across Microsoft 365, Bing, and Edge. See the latest roadmap across all your experiences, from SharePoint to Office and beyond. In addition, get insights into how to connect external third-party content connectors, customization, and extensibility. – Kathrine Hammervold & Robin Thomas

Administration and Management

Learn how Microsoft CSEO use Microsoft search in its enterprise, to boost its workforce’s productivity and finding experience​

​Learn from Microsoft’s own internal team – CSEO, its sixth engineering and user experience division about how it empowers its users.  ​

Tune in to hear from CSEO about how it serves as the first and best customer, a co-developer and enable its users to find things faster and be more productive using Microsoft search.  Learn from CSEO about how the organization is measuring user experiences, empowering its employees using the latest and greatest features of Microsoft search and partnering with its sister organization to improve the product further.  – Anishkumar Thoppil Ramakrishnan, Vijaya Alaparthi, Dodd Willingham & Sapna Nadkarni

Make the most of Microsoft Search through Configuration and Administration

Deliver value, knowledge, and answers with precision to improve discovery and productivity.  In this session we will cover the role of the search administrator and how they can use Microsoft Search to improve user productivity. We will also look into the future and explore how the role intersects with knowledge management and other user productivity experiences. – Mugdha Pophali & Lesha Bhansali

Unifying your organization’s search experience with minimal effort

Microsoft Search and Graph connectors together empower you to eliminate data silos to provide a unified experience for your users to search for information they need. In this session, you will learn about powerful differentiating features and capabilities that our partners can provide to help you achieve the ultimate search experience for your organization. – James Lau & Microsoft Partners

What’s new with Microsoft Search in Microsoft 365 applications and services

Microsoft Search in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business

Microsoft Search is built directly into the experiences in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business. This session will cover the features available from enterprise search scenarios in SharePoint Start Page/Home Sites, to search capabilities in sites and across hubs, as well as in lists and libraries. We will also look at some of the newer search capabilities in OneDrive for Business, including being able to search in shared libraries. – Thanuja Priyadarshani & Kerem Yuceturk

What’s new and what’s next for Microsoft Search in Microsoft Teams

The goal for search in Microsoft Teams is to help you achieve more by making information in Microsoft 365 easy to navigate, find, research, and assist in task completion. Come learn about the features which we have released in Teams search including contextual search, intelligent people lookups, message search and more, backed by the incredibly powerful and intelligent Microsoft Search platform. We will also do a sneak peek of the full-page immersive search result page experience which we are building to help you be more productive. – Raja Mohan & Sruthy P Narayanan

Completing the Search journey – Search your documents like you search the web

Finding the right answers in a long document is very time-consuming and error prone. We regularly hear from customers: why can’t this just work like when I search on the web? In this session, we’ll look at how we’re bringing the power of the latest web Search experiences can power in document search and answer finding. – Derik Stenerson

What’s new and what’s next for Microsoft Search in Bing

Make searching for your enterprise as easy and convenient as searching the web. See how you can save people time and your company money when info from across the cloud, intranet, SharePoint, and Office are just a few keystrokes away. We’ll demo new features and give you a sneak peek of what’s coming next, as well as share change management strategies so you’re sure to make a big impact this year with Microsoft Search. – Livani Pillay

What’s new for Microsoft Search in Outlook

Get the latest on what’s new and what’s coming to Microsoft Search in Outlook. – Tali Roth

Search in the Productivity Applications

This session will focus on the new experiences we are delivering via search in the Office productivity applications such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.  We will cover how search connects users to the knowledge of the organization and the world while helping users to stay in the flow of their work. – Nathan Freier

Customizing Microsoft Search

Moving classic SharePoint search to Microsoft Search

Microsoft Search is the best foot forward for companies in Enterprise Search scenarios with built-in people search, personalized suggestions and ranking, admin capabilities with analytics, bookmarks, locations, floor plans, as well as customization features such as ingesting content that’s outside of Microsoft 365. It is built into Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, OneDrive, office.com and Bing so that users are already set up to use it in the applications they use every day. It is designed to work on day one without the need for customer tuning or set up but can be made better if there is an administrator that’s willing to configure and customize.

Microsoft Search is already available and being used by your users. To ensure consistency and familiarity for your users it is time to finally invest in Microsoft Search. 

If you have questions about why you should transition, or how you can best plan the transition, we will walk you through it. – Jyoti Pal & Mikael Svenson

Make Microsoft Search uniquely yours with new customization options

Modern information workers need to find knowledge quickly and easily through familiar and intuitive experiences wherever they’re already working.  In this session, we’ll demonstrate how Microsoft Search will let you create and customize rich search experiences around all of your enterprise content, regardless of where it resides. See  examples of how to modernize your existing enterprise search experiences to take full advantage of Microsoft Search from Bing, to Office to SharePoint and beyond. – Roshan Dheram & Ram Poornalingam

Use Microsoft Search API in our own application

Modern information workers need to find knowledge quickly and easily through familiar and intuitive experiences wherever they’re already working.  In this session, we’ll demonstrate how Microsoft Search API in the Microsoft Graph will let you create rich search experiences around all of your enterprise content, regardless of where it resides. See some examples of how-to bring search closer to users and how to programmatically take full advantage of Microsoft Search. – Nicolas Moreau

Microsoft Graph connectors

Graph connectors for Microsoft Search: What’s new?

Graph connectors for Microsoft Search allows organizations to bring content from 3rd party data sources into the search index. This enables the end-users in the organization to be able to search the M365 content and 3rd party content all in a single place i.e. SharePoint, Office.com or Bing.com etc. We have 10 Microsoft built connectors and 130+ partner-built connectors. In this session, we will demonstrate some of the newer Microsoft built connectors and some new capabilities built in connectors and the end user experience for searching the 3rd party content. – Shakun Grover, Vamsi Bhagi & Suhel Parekh

Implementing open enterprise search with Microsoft Search & Microsoft Graph connectors

Modern information workers need to find knowledge quickly and easily regardless of where the data resides in your organization. In this session, you will learn about how you can use Microsoft Graph connectors to connect your worlds of information to Microsoft Search and Microsoft 365, empowering your users with the relevant information at their fingertips. – James Lau & Mounika Narayanan

Breakthrough Innovation

Introducing people search in Microsoft Search

Microsoft Search has always put people first and at the center of search…  usually when you’re searching for information, you work from its edges to its center, in the same way we may build a puzzle.  The strength of Microsoft Search is that is allows you to build that information from the center, the person, outward. 

It’s people who create and curate knowledge, and we believe that allowing you to anchor on that person, their knowledge, and solve the information puzzle working outward, delivers greater precision, and a more delightful experience – because sometimes the answer you’re looking for isn’t found in a document, it’s found in a person. – Ashley Hall

Applying AI at Scale with Microsoft Search

Businesses worldwide are learning AI is incredibly useful to deriving insights from massive data sets and therefore helping reduce repetitive tasks; however, with that there is also the realization that is only half of the equation. The other half is that of maximizing employee’s ability to take these AI-driven insights and use them in creative ways to solve challenges, identify opportunities, and democratize knowledge.

With Microsoft 365, the world’s productivity cloud, we’re bringing world class productivity experiences across apps services. Thanks to new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, we can build experiences across devices to connect organizations from the shop floor to the top floor. Through our deep learning models, we’re able to bring new, innovative experiences across the products you’re already using.

In this session learn more about how we’re applying AI at Scale to deliver world class experiences that allow you to find more, do more, and discover more with Microsoft Search. – Youngji Kim & Kate Cook

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And this is just the beginning, be sure to check out sessions from Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Project Cortex, Cortana, and more for additional coverage of Microsoft Search at Ignite.

In addition, we’ll be offering unique opportunities to engage with our product teams, get answers to your questions, and more.  Stay tuned for details.

Updates to the Microsoft Tech Community- September 10th,2020

by Scott Muniz | Sep 10, 2020 | Uncategorized

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Over the last couple of months, we have been making some changes to the Microsoft Tech Community to improve page load times and user experience. We are pleased to share with you the next update. 

In this update we have made changes to: 

• My Dashboard 
• Community Hubs 
• Community Banners 
• Primary Search 
• Microsoft Verified Answer 

My Dashboard 

The old “My Home”, though much loved by community super users, MVPs and Employees was originally designed when the community was less than a 10th of size it is today and was not fit for purpose for our community. 

With this in mind, we have completely re-skinned both the shortcut and the My Dashboard view and added some new features we hope you will like. 

My Shortcuts 

My Shortcuts used to be access using the heart symbol in the top right, next to the notification bell. 

The new My Shortcuts is accessed using a list icon that is in the same location as the old heart icon: 

We have tried to focus on getting you to the content we know you are most interested in as quickly as possible, and so My Shortcuts is powered by Discussion Spaces, Blogs, Knowledge Bases, Ideas that you have followed. 

Recently Visited stores the last 5 placed you have visited in the Microsoft Tech Community so you can get back to where you left off from, even if it’s not a Space you have previously followed. 

My Dashboard 

The old My Dashboard was looking a little tired and so within the new My Dashboard you can: 

• Manage the communities you have joined. 
• Follow and un-follow spaces. 
• See your most recent posts, replies, best responses and blog articles. 
• Review the 3 newest, most popular, and unanswered questions from the spaces you follow. 

• See the 3 latest blog articles from blogs you have followed. 
• If there is a question within one of the boards, you follow that has not been answered then there is a component that will ask if you can help answer this. (*) 

* Currently this is asking if you can help answer unanswered questions in popular boards but we will be changing this behaviour shortly to use the boards you have followed 

In this update we have tried to put you and the content you care the most about front and center and so a new feature we have added to My Dashboard, is the ability to set it as your homepage. When enabled it means the community homepage will always by your dashboard.  

Community Hubs 

Continuing with the theme in this update of getting you to the content you are looking for as quickly as possible, we redesigned the community hubs page. You will now see all the hubs you have joined by default and have the option to view all hubs on the second tab. 

We made the search in Community Hubs more powerful, so that when you search by a keyword it not only shows you Hubs that match your keyword but also any spaces. You can Join or leave any hub right from the Community Hubs page, as well as follow or un-follow any spaces. 

You can also expand a Community Hub card and see the most recently active spaces for that hub. 

By default, the hubs are sorted by most recent activity but can also be sorted by: 

• A to Z 
• Z to A 
• Newly Added 

Community Banners 

We took the opportunity to redesign the Microsoft Tech Community banners so that we could make better use of this hero space to not only communicate where you are in the Microsoft Tech Community, but also the activity in the community hub you are currently viewing. A key part of this design change was to also make the header more accessible and work across screen sizes. For communities that do not have a custom banner this is what the new community banner looks like. 

For communities that have custom banners we have tried to balance this customization with the need to make the site feel consistent.  

Primary Search 

In an effort to give search a little more prominence, when a user clicks our search button it now overlays over our primary navigation to give a much larger space for quick results to display.  This also helps provide a more consistent search experience across all screen sizes. 

We are currently working on an update which will also make the size of the quick results drop down take advantage of this extra space. 

Microsoft Verified Answer 

Working in a similar way to the Best Solutions system we already provide today, but managed by Microsoft Employees, the purpose of this is to give us a way to highlight answers that are provided in the community that align with Microsoft’s policies, guidelines or best practices. 

 Have questions or feedback? Feel free to post them in the comments below.