Microsoft Graph Connectors with Microsoft Search

In the February SharePoint Roadmap Pitstop, it was announced that two new Graph Connectors were released for Atlassian Confluence and Jira. Microsoft Search is powerful on its own as it indexes all Microsoft 365 data, thereby enabling this data to be searchable by users, but with two new Graph Connectors, the ability to search has become more powerful as third-party data can now be indexed, searched, and displayed in the Microsoft Search results. The Graph Connector for Confluence cloud will now index Confluence pages and blogs from Microsoft Search endpoints, such as SharePoint, Office.com, Bing, and others, making them searchable. The Graph Connector for Jira cloud will index Jira issues and tickets, allowing this data to be searchable for users.

Graph Connectors connect platforms so data can be shared seamlessly and smoothly. Microsoft provides 9 Graph Connectors while partners provide over 100 and there are many more that have been custom built to suit an organization’s needs.

Microsoft Graph Connectors – Microsoft

Microsoft Graph Connectors will allow you to connect with the following data sources:

  1. Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2
  2. Azure DevOps*
  3. Azure SQL and Microsoft SQL Server
  4. Confluence Cloud
  5. Confluence On-Premises*
  6. Enterprise Websites
  7. MediaWiki
  8. File Share
  9. Oracle SQL
  10. Salesforce
  11. ServiceNow Knowledge
  12. ServiceNow Catalog*

          * As of March 2022, these Graph Connectors are only available in preview.  

Brief descriptions of these Graph Connectors can be found in the Microsoft Graph Connectors Gallery. Additional information and instructions are located in the Setup Overview document which will assist when the comes time to connect one of these data sources to your tenant.

Microsoft Graph Connectors – Partners

Partners who have created a connector are listed in the Microsoft Graph Connectors Gallery with a short description of the connector plus a link to their website is included. Partners will be able to answer any questions or inquiries direct.   

Microsoft Graph Connectors – Building Your Own  

If your preference is to build your connector, you can do so by reading Build Your First Custom Microsoft Graph Connector which provides a step-by-step approach to build your first connector. Greater detail for developers can be found in the documentation on building connectors at the Microsoft Graph Connectors Overview.

Configuring and Managing Microsoft Graph Connectors

Both managing and configuring the Graph Connectors are accomplished through the Microsoft 365 Admin Centre and under the Connections tab.  

Search results can be customized and configured for Graph Connectors by managing:

  1. Search Verticals: the results appearing on the search result page under the tabs will be based on specific types of sources or from select sources. These are managed on two levels. The first is the organizational level where search results initiated from a SharePoint start page, Microsoft Office, and Microsoft Search in Bing. The second is at the site level where search results are initiated from a SharePoint site.
  2. Search Result Types: on the search results page, Graph Connectors content will be displayed in a layout that is designed by using result types.
  3. Search Result Layouts: the custom vertical result layout can be designed by implementing the layout designer. You can either start by choosing a pre-configured template that meets the requirements, edit a pre-configured template by either modifying text, adding or removing text, and adding or removing images, or choose a blank template to design your customized layout.
  4. Result Clusters: these are results grouped based on the configuration of the search vertical and allow users to discover third-party content in one location from their All tab and default view in SharePoint, Office.com, and Microsoft Search in Bing.
  5. Custom Filters: two types of filters allow users to refine their query for greater refined results. Out-of-the-box filters include the default search filters Files, All, News, and Images. Custom filters are added to custom search verticals at both organization and site levels.  

With Microsoft Graph Connectors, the power of Search has been exponentially increased through the inclusion of indexed data from third parties. Users can now search across many more resources, gather more information, increase knowledge, work more collaboratively, and make better-informed decisions.   

Microsoft Ignite Virtual 2020: Microsoft Search – The Answers

In our previous article, Microsoft Search – The Questions, we reviewed the many exciting new features and many improvements to Microsoft Search, with the focus on the question. In this article, our focus will be on the answer because that is what Microsoft Search is about – asking the question to obtain the most accurate and relevant answer quickly.

What happens when you Search? You get answers! There are now new and improved answers in Microsoft Search:

Acronym Answers: acronyms can have different meanings between different types of sectors, within an organization, and even between projects and Teams within an organization. It is now easier to find out what an acronym stands for within an organization with a simple query such as “Define…”  as the definition is mined from content that your organization has curated, the content accessed by a user and the definition as defined by a Microsoft 365 Administrator. Acronym Answers is available in English in SharePoint and Office.com, Bing.com (other languages in addition to English), and soon it will be available for Outlook mobile, Outlook web, Teams Mobile, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Calendar Answers: available on the Outlook mobile app, you can use either voice or type in the search box to find your meetings without having to scroll to find it. Find your meeting or event by title, time of the meeting, or attendee name and RSVP, join a Teams meeting, or send an email right from the answer. On the desktop, you can search for the meeting or replying to an invitation with the meeting notes, all from the inbox.

File Answers: searching for files in Outlook can be tedious – opening emails with attachments only to find that it is not the right one and repeating until you find the right one – extremely time-consuming! With File Answers, searching for file documents in Outlook can be achieved by using natural syntax that contains the author of the file, the sender of the email that contains the file, the file name, file type across attachments that have been received, and shared files from Teams chat, OneDrive for Business, and SharePoint.

Optimizing Search for Your Users

Your users, and your organization, depend upon successful searches conducted for information, content, and people but how does the Administrator know that users are finding what they need? With improved search analytics and a new feedback loop, Administrators will begin to receive better information on Search’s success with their users. Improvements and new features include:

Admin Feedback: as part of the search lifecycle, users will be able to provide secured feedback on the quality and accuracy of search results and suggested answers to the search administrator to help improve Search.

Analytics: with the right tools and insights, search administrators can keep team members productive with the new Microsoft Search Insights dashboard. Insights include top search queries on Microsoft Search, impression distribution over time, and what users are searching for.

Personalizing and customizing Search allows it to work at its best as it is working based on your organization’s and team’s unique needs. Personalization and customization will be rolled out, including the ability to customize verticals and filters, add your organization’s filters that are based on refinable managed properties, edit out of the box verticals, and change how results will look like. Compelling views of connector content via Adaptive Cards can be simply created by a layout designer.

Microsoft Search is Everywhere! But Where, Exactly?

Microsoft Search has been becoming available in Microsoft 365 apps and services, including contextual search in Microsoft Teams, with more improvements coming, Windows, and Outlook.

Microsoft Teams: using CTRL + F plus search terms allows desktop users to search in channels and chats, resulting in contextual search results. This ability is now available for the mobile app. The full page of immersive search results is optimized with better relevance and context, resulting in improved user recognition. By applying filters, users will find content faster and exactly what they are searching for. Microsoft Search will suggest and introduce answers that are mined from the organization, knowledge that is curated by its users. Because the answers are unique to the organization, the user will access relevant information quicker, and in turn, return to complete their tasks more quickly.

Outlook: fun fact – the most popular activity is email with search as the second most popular activity. A successful search understands ambiguities, the language being used, and delivers reliable results when you need them. In the new search bar for Outlook, there is a new microphone option so that users can either speak or type the search criteria. Search criteria can be contact specific, and the result will provide an actionable result. Search criteria can also be a specific contact, and the results will result in actionable and relevant results as opposed to keywords from email or calendar information.

Windows: when logged in with their work account, uses will be able to search local and organizational content from the Windows search box.

Microsoft Office: located at the top of the app, Microsoft Search is easily accessible in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. By combining query, document understanding, indexing, and deep learning-based natural language models, search queries do not have to be an exact match for content to be found. On the mobile app, scanning QR codes, signing of PDFs, and turning pictures into editable Word and Excel documents are additional features that can be done.

Information Islands – How to Connect Them

Knowledge is exponential when it is shared and when the collaborators are situated in many different offices, including home offices, information can be distributed across platforms, ranging from cloud applications to on-premises. Connecting this information is the key to continued growth, collaboration, and success. Microsoft Graph connectors will become available for Microsoft Search, becoming the connector for disparate systems so that information can be found across the systems.

A new subscription is available for organizations without an Office 365 subscription. Microsoft Search service is now a standalone product that is available that allows the connection of applications and data platforms and will help users to quickly and accurately find the information they are searching for.

As they say, knowledge is power, but how to get that knowledge is dependent upon asking a relevant question and receiving accurate, precise, and up to date answers. With Microsoft Search, asking a question has never been easier, and obtaining the best answers quickly with accurate relevancy is the golden grail as Microsoft Search, powered by AI, combs through content across platforms and systems, curating it based on personalization and customization, and delivering it quickly to the user. Microsoft Search, with its people-centric focus, is once again raising the bar and changing the face of how information is obtained as a response to how we perform our day to day tasks.

Microsoft Ignite Virtual 2020: Microsoft Search – The Questions

Every day, every session at the 2020 Microsoft Ignite Virtual conference has been like opening a gift bag of surprises. There is one surprise after another, and they just keep coming! These are all super pleasant surprises – enough to get any user, admin, or corporation excited to start implementing and using them. Microsoft Search is one these – who ever thought a search engine could get this exciting?!?

The best way to describe how search historically works is by comparing it to a human model in real life. Think about losing a physical item, like your debit card. What is the first thing you do when you realize you have lost it? Well, we deny we lost it and like to believe we misplaced it. With that, one begins to think backwards, starting with when was the last time you used it to purchase an item. Then, the last location when you remember having used it. You continue to progressively narrow your search down to a position that is detailed and small, and finally, to an exact location, such as the basket located on the top of your dresser. This works if you are the one that misplaced your card but what if someone else misplaced theirs? Or the card you are looking for belongs to someone else? This process is no longer this simple and the process will change in response to the change in parameters. Because the process is not necessarily the same for each event to perform a search, it is not consistent, and the final outcome is an inconsistency with the results. Historically, search operates similarly – a serious of queries with continuous refining until you find what you are looking for.   

Microsoft 365’s Search is responding to the needs of users as it evolves to become more intelligent. Not only is it becoming more personal, but it will provide precision with minimal effort as context awareness will provide personalized, trending, and important results with each first search you perform.

What are the New Search Features?

As we all know, traditional search engines, like the analogy above, work from the peripheral towards the centre to find the information. Another great analogy is how to put a jigsaw puzzle together. Most people solve a puzzle by working on the edges first because completing the frame of the puzzle is the easiest. Once the frame is completed, it becomes the anchor for the remainder of the puzzle work, which proceeds to work from the edges towards the centre.

Microsoft, especially seen in Teams and SharePoint, is the opposite. Information is provided by the user, and this information radiates outwards to the Team and other users involved in the collaboration. This process brings us to the first new feature, People-Centric Search. Furthering collaboration and utilizing collective knowledge, People-Centric Search provides the ability to scope and refine your search to an individual because knowledge is not always in the written word, but more often it is an individual who has that knowledge.

Many more new features of Microsoft Search include:

Find Skills and Expertise: bringing together a team involves finding individuals with specific skill sets. With Find Skills and Expertise, you can now find individuals with expertise and skills that you are looking for within your organization that are based on machine learning algorithms which are identified from self-attestation, content understanding, collaborative patterns gleaned from email and documents, and the addition of skills in the user profile.

Power BI Search: according to business intelligence and analytics, Power BI is the Magic Quadrant Leader. By integrating Power BI Search, reports and dashboards are now searchable in SharePoint, Office.com, and Bing.

Conversation Search: a new Conversations vertical will allow a search across apps and services such as Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, Yammer, and Office.com for conversations.

Image Search: images can now be searched across SharePoint and Office.com.

Improved Filter Design and New Filters: easily find files, pages, presentations, or other information with precision by utilizing the out of the box filters.

Topic Search: Topic Search falls under the umbrella of Project Cortex and will be available later in the calendar year. AI will be used to curate, build, and organize knowledge topics across Teams and systems, automatically organizing related resources to create topic pages. Topics can be either manually created or they can be automatically mined from content curated by users. Topics will have a definition, name description, and will be connected to content (file and sites), people, and conversations, bringing together people, information, and content.

Personal Query History: have you ever performed a search, then jumped to another search, and then later that day, you wanted to go back to what you found in the first search at the beginning of the day? We actively use search throughout the day, and to go back to that first search of the day, we either have to enter the exact words or we have had to memorize the exact sequence of words to duplicate the search. With Personal Query History, that is no longer the case because your recent searches will appear as you type in the search box, assisting you to see recently used information. This setting is managed through Office 365>My Account Settings, and the ability to delete or download for future reference Personal Query History can be found under My Account Privacy Controls.

These new features are exciting as they will, undoubtedly, make searching for information and content that much easier, accurate, and relevant. Microsoft Search features are not only impacting the front end of a search, they are also impacting the back end of a search – the answers! More explanations in my next article, Microsoft Search: The Answers.

Modern Search in SharePoint Online: The User Experience

What is Modern Search? SharePoint Online users will experience Modern Search, which is Microsoft search in SharePoint (the classic search experience). Modern Search results, generated from the insights of Microsoft Graph, are relevant to each user whereas Classic Search generates results that are geared more towards the organization.  With Modern Search, daily tasks are simplified by relevant content curation for users. For example, users can easily find the correct version of a document to edit, a document that is being worked on collaboratively, or even a presentation to continue editing.

Let’s take a step back and review Microsoft Search. Microsoft Search brings together the action of searching the web and work as one experience on any device and on any browser. Microsoft Search brings the right information, at the right time to the user, including people, groups, conversations, locations, resources and tools, files, and SharePoint sites. Microsoft Search is powerful and the safest way to share information across an organization. In our article, Microsoft Search and SharePoint Search, we delve deeper into the relationship between the two.

By default, both search experiences are enabled. Even though both search experiences implement the same search index to find results, users will experience the different search experiences based on where they are searching from (the launch portal). Users will experience the Classic Search on publishing sites, in the Search Center, and on classic site teams. The Modern Search experience for users will be found on the SharePoint home page, hub sites, communication sites, and modern team sites. A visual cue as to which search is being experienced is the location of the Microsoft search box, which appears in the header bar at the top of SharePoint plus it produces customized content for the user for both Modern and Microsoft Search.

One of the key features of Modern Search is the ability to get back to a previous task quickly and easily. This is done by providing a list of results based on recent activities in Office 365 and they appear in relevant order within the search box, even before any typing begins for the search. As the user types, the search box will update the suggestions automatically. Finding shared files that are used for collaboration are easily searched, discovered, and displayed with the application of advanced query understanding.

Another useful and intelligent feature of Modern Search is the simplicity of placing your cursor inside the search box and then pressing Enter to discover new information. By doing this, the search results will bring the most relevant information to the user. The results are based on the user’s previous activity in Office 365 with the most relevant at the top. Without leaving Search, the user has the capability to explore results to assess if the information is relevant and what they are looking for before accessing it.

Modern Search is dynamic. Leveraging AI, the relevant content harvested will grow, and as the user utilized Modern Search, the more relevant and the more accurate the results will become.  Not only will the content grow over time, but the set of content types that users search for will also dynamically grow, continually evolving to meet each user’s needs.

As a search administrator, Microsoft search can be used to promote information and answers that are targeted to specific groups or teams. Promoted information or answers may include resource tools to complete tasks, policies, company benefits, collective agreements, and more. By showing relevant content, it promotes the successful completion of tasks amongst teams.

Modern Search offers the user a personalized experience with a great user interface, all without the need of it being configured by a search administrator. Rather, any search administration applies to Microsoft Search across all apps.

One key point that differentiates the Classic Search from the Modern Search is that Classic Search can be customized to curate organization-focussed content. The search administrator, by adding custom refiners, can produce customized content on the search results page. On the other hand, the Modern Search experience cannot be customized but it can be tailored so users can find relevant content easily while meeting the needs of the organization.

To customize the Classic Search experience, you would access the SharePoint Admin Center but for Microsoft Search, access would be through the Microsoft 365 Admin Centre. Even though customizing and tailoring are done through two different admin centres, certain aspects of the Classic Search settings will have an impact on the Modern Search experience. Details and explanations of these impacts are discussed in our article Microsoft Search and SharePoint Search.

With Modern Search in SharePoint Online, collaboration on the go is extremely portable. Modern Search is fully mobile-friendly, displaying result pages that fit onto any portable device screen.

Without a doubt, users will have an exceptional experience with Microsoft Search and with Modern Search in SharePoint Online. Which search experience users will have is totally dependent upon their organization’s use of classic or modern sites.

In our next article, Modern Search in SharePoint Online: The Search Administrator, we will review the differences between Modern Search and Classic Search along with the impacts of planning and/or migrating to Modern Search from classic sites.

Modern Search in SharePoint Online: The Search Administrator

In our previous article, Modern Search in SharePoint Online: The User Experience, we explained how the Modern Search experience provides powerful search capabilities for users to curate relevant, important, and personalized content to the user while the Microsoft, or Classic, Search experience provides organization-specific information.

From an administration point of view, deciding when to use which one of the search experiences is a consideration when planning the implementation of Modern Search. Both search experiences require content that has been indexed but because Modern Search uses the same index as Classic Search, nothing is required to be done if your organization is already using Classic Search. Additionally, the modern search boxes are defaulted to appear on the SharePoint homepage and modern sites, eliminating the need for configuration by a search administrator.

There are two options when it comes to the launching portal into different search experiences. Where to launch the portal from is directly related to the end goal of what is being achieved. Launching from the Search Centre will provide different results than from the SharePoint homepage.

Launching from the Search Centre (Classic Search) will allow custom refiners and search verticals for organization-specific content. This also provides the ability to display organization-specific content results differently than other content for it to stand out. The second method of launching is from the SharePoint home page and this can be done by encouraging and promoting users to use the SharePoint start page to initiate Microsoft Search (Modern Search in SharePoint Online). By launching from the SharePoint home page, content delivered will be user-specific.

Migrating from a classic to a modern site will impact the search experience if you have a customized search. Remember that a classic site has a classic search box while a modern site will have a Microsoft search box. With classic sites, the search box can be customized, such as redirecting to a custom Search Centre to display filtered and formatted results that are organization-specific based on content types. The Microsoft search experience cannot be customized in this fashion and it is recommended to use modern sites if the search box does not need to be customized. This method would provide user-relevant content.

An efficient way for users to search across all sites of an administrative unit is to use a hub site to organize the sites. Hub sites use Microsoft search boxes which means that searches target people, files, news, and sites across all associated sites of that hub. This can also be achieved with the classic search box, but it would be time intensive and not the most efficient method.

On the plus side, Microsoft search can be used in combination with cloud hybrid search. On-premises and online content for cloud hybrid search are indexed in the same index that is accessed for classic and Microsoft search experiences.

Keep in mind when migrating or deciding when to use the Classic Search or Modern Search experiences that the Modern Search experience shows results only from the default result source. If the default result source is changed, then both search experiences are impacted. Likewise, removing a search result, even temporarily, will remove it from both search experiences.

Earlier, we discussed how a search administrator can use Microsoft search to promote information and answers that are targeted to specific groups or teams. For the Classic Search experience, search administrators define the promoted results that provide users with relevant and important content. Unlike the classic search experience, Microsoft Search experience requires the search administrator to use bookmarks to achieve the same result.

Promoted results can be created at an organizational level. At this level, if a user was to search across the whole organization, the promoted results might appear in the All tab on the Microsoft search results page.

As an example, let’s say a user searches from the search box on a hub site. Performing a search from the hub site garnishes results from sites associated with the hub only and will not see any of the promoted results in the All tab. However, if the user had performed the search from the SharePoint home page, then the promoted content may appear on the All tab. If the promoted result was defined and the same content was bookmarked with the same URL, then only the bookmark would appear in the All tab.

As one can see, planning the implementation of Modern Search with Microsoft Search requires a thorough understanding of the relationship between them as well as how sites function, particularly hub sites, classic sites, and modern sites.

Modern Search in SharePoint Online brings personalized content to the user while Classic Search provides the ability for search administrators to customize promoted content that can be targeted to specific groups or teams within the organization. Microsoft is rethinking, redefining, and changing how search is used by combining Modern Search in SharePoint Online, Microsoft Search, and AI.

Microsoft Ignite 2019 Announcements: The Intelligent Intranet: Part 2

Microsoft Ignite 2019 has been a plethora of game-changing announcements, not only in the way we use technology, but how we see knowledge as being a consumable that is used to upscale, grow, and collaborate to achieve successful end results. By leveraging and investing in AI, Microsoft continues to innovate and create new, collaborative, and communicative business worlds with intelligent intranets that interface with many other software technologies and platforms.   

Microsoft Search

Creating and supporting an intelligent intranet requires an excellent search engine, and Microsoft Search is the engine behind the intelligent intranet. Microsoft Search has new vertical menus, which include videos, custom videos, and knowledgebase articles. Microsoft Search is a SharePoint page and can be customized and tailored with web parts.

Page Authoring

New abilities with page authoring include:

1. Image Resize: easily adjust image sizes when adding to news posts and pages;

2. Change Tracking: content authors can visually see what changes have been made. In edit mode, content authors can choose the version to review and changes will be highlighted. Changes include additions, edits, and deleted items and text;

3. News Filtering: news filtering can be accomplished across sites with managed metadata;

4. Yammer Conversations Web Part (v2): combined with a new Yammer design that is rolling out, participants will be able to ask questions, compose rich-text posts, and mark and discover best answers;

5. “My Feed” Web Part: leveraging AI, relevant news, documents, activities, and other personalized content is brought together;

6. Royalty-Free Stock Photography and Images: accessible in the UI, thousands of high-quality, high-resolution, and royalty-free images can be uploaded for pages and news authoring. This inventory will continue to grow over time; and

7. News and Page Scheduling: news posts, announcements, and pages can be written in advance and then be published at a future date and time, providing flexibility and streamlining the process of posting.

Multilingual Capabilities

There have been many exciting announcements at Ignite 2019, and one of the top and long-awaited announcements is the support for multi-languages in the Modern Experience for SharePoint Communication Sites. The creation of content and sites in multiple languages is possible with the language hero web part. Users can choose their preferred language, and they can switch between languages.  

Content translators will receive a notification of revisions. To help visualize the differences between versions, the new version history will display the differences between any two versions of a page. This will enable content translators to quickly and easily translate additional content as needed.

SharePoint Lookbook

The SharePoint Lookbook was a huge hit last year! Lookbooks originate in the fashion industry where photographers and models created a book of looks that were expected to arrive for the future season. Today, lookbooks are common with vloggers and bloggers, and now, Microsoft is on the lookbook train.

The latest SharePoint Lookbook consists of collections of stunning sites that are categorized under Organization, Department, Team, and Community. Without a doubt, these sites are eye-catching and inspirational. Provisioning sites are fast and are done inside of Microsoft 365. The design templates can be directly added to your tenant for future use.

OneDrive

With OneDrive, navigating files across platforms will provide a common file experience whether you are on the desktop, mobile, or tablet that is running on Windows, iOs, Android, or LINUX.  

One of the most exciting features being implemented on the web view for shared libraries is the hovercard. The hovercard is an amazing little pop-up and displays information. The hovercard displays metadata information from threaded conversations, documents from Microsoft Teams, mail, and conversations from other sites.  

Files, especially image files, are becoming larger and larger as quality and resolution increase. In Microsoft 365, 110GB files are now being supported. Because of the size of the files, delta sync technology has been implemented whereby only delta changes will be synced when revisions are made, ensuring fast upload speed of large files to the cloud.

SharePoint Spaces

Microsoft is enabling SharePoint end-users to create 3D scenes with 3D objects, 2D documents, photos, and 360º videos, which all can be integrated into the site. For a full, immersive experience, users can wear a virtual headset.

The intelligent intranet, SharePoint, is all about teamwork, content collaboration, and employee empowerment, and these new features provide the means to continue to do so with greater flexibility, increased capability, and easier communicability.

Microsoft Ignite 2019 Announcements: The Intelligent Intranet: Part 1

As technology evolves, so have the platforms and offerings from Microsoft. Office 365 is now a part of Microsoft 365, and Microsoft has been announcing major enhancements to Microsoft 365. Microsoft Teams has, and is, seeing many new enhancements, and we can expect that SharePoint will also be receiving new features that are directly related to Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams.    

For the majority of us, we know that SharePoint is known to be the cloud storage component of Office 365 and has been the cornerstone of the business intranet within an enterprise. As SharePoint moves with Office 365 to Microsoft 365, some significant changes are taking place. Fun fact: there are over 100 million active users of SharePoint in the cloud

SharePoint Home Sites

Powered by AI, SharePoint Home Sites is the landing page for an organization’s users that is customized based on the user’s role. Super intelligent, SharePoint Home Sites provide a customized view of relevant information for the user based on the information that they search, require, and interact with based on their roles and the teams that they belong with. Collaboration tools like Yammer and Stream are pulled into SharePoint Home Sites, making access easy and streamlining the processes for collaboration. Other features include:

1. Targeted Navigation: a mega menu appears on the Home Sites. Recognizing that large enterprises span different countries with many offices, the mega menu can be configured with the advanced navigation capabilities to target sites that are role and site-specific;

2. Web Feed: based on the Graph, the web feed can be personalized to preview relevant conversations, news articles, and videos from within the organization but also include news articles from the internet that are being discussed within the teams. Videos can be created with Microsoft stream, and with noise cancellation driven by AI technology, videos play sharp and clear; and

3. Integration of the New Yammer: integrated for communities inside your SharePoint intranet, Yammer provides one of the social platforms for collaborative discussions and the sharing of news.

Branding

Branding is vital to the instant recognition of an organization through visual association with the product or service that it delivers. SharePoint provides consistent, visual, and text branding to its customers, and now, it has added more features to ensure device-wide organization branding across the intelligent intranet and sites. These new abilities include:

1. SharePoint Mobile App Co-Branding: an organization’s branding can easily be added and featured in the SharePoint Mobile app. No longer will the organization name be SharePoint at the top;

2. SharePoint Mobile App and an Organization’s Custom Branding: an organization’s custom branding is now supported in the SharePoint Mobile app with a logo image, text, app theme colours (top navigation bar), and accent colours for a co-branded experience for the organization’s employees;

3. Expanded Footer: located at bottom of the Page, as a requirement, the customizable footer is applied to all Pages of the organization’s intelligent intranet. Background colour choices are supported along with the ability to organize links in the footer;

4. Shy Header and Options: a Shy Header allows the size of the site header to be reduced. Additional options include the ability to hide the site title and add a site logo thumbnail for the sites;

5. Microsoft Fluent Design System: customer needs are delivered across platforms through the utilization of innovative technology;

6. SharePoint Teal Default Theme: the SharePoint brand colors will be converted from the existing blue default theme to the new Teal theme for new and existing modern and classic communication team sites and for non-group connected team sites; and

7. Classic Sites with Modern Communication Sites Experience: classic team sites that are not modern group connected can now have a modern communication site experience. Classic team sites that have the classic publishing feature will also be able to experience the modern communication site.

New Hub Capabilities

Providing a point of organization for content across SharePoint sites, hubs can be used to organize content, teams, divisions or resources throughout the organization based on attributes such as region, division, department, and project. Hubs were first announced in Ignite 2017, and at Ignite 2019, new features and enhancements are being announced for hubs. These include:

1. Hub Permissions: centralizing the management of access to associated sites;

2. Hub Analytics: providing hub-wide usage insights including total visitors, popular content, page views, and other useful analytical data;

3. Associated Hubs: enabling discovery and search experiences across hubs with easy navigation between them; and

4. Audience Targeting: navigating hubs based on specific criteria such as office location and user role as defined in an organization’s Azure Active Directory group. Targeted navigation is one of the new enhancements for SharePoint Home Sites.

There have been numerous mind-blowing announcements ranging from Project Cortex to the flexibility and collaborative nature of Microsoft Teams to the new and improved intelligent intranet. Believe it or not, but this is not the end of the new features for the intelligent intranet. Our next article will discuss the SharePoint Lookbook and the new page authoring and publishing features.

Search Web Parts – Collab365 Global Conference

 

Have you heard about the virtual Collab365 Global Conference 2017 that’s streaming online November 1st – 2nd?

Join me and 120 other speakers from around the world who will be bringing you the very latest content around SharePoint, Office 365, Flow, PowerApps, Azure, OneDrive for Business and of course the increasingly popular Microsoft Teams. The event is produced by the Collab365 Community and is entirely free to attend.

Places are limited to 5000 so be quick and register now.

During the conference I'd love you to watch my session which is called : 'Search Web Parts'

Content Search Web Part (CSWP) is one of the great web parts in O365 and on-premises. In this session, Mike will demo how to configure a​nd use the CSWP, and build a dynamic O365 branded portal with CSWP only. In this session, we will review: 1.Creating Queries using Keyword Query Language (KQL) 2.Building dynamic queries 3.Creating and customizing HTML Display Templates​​.​

If you join me, you will learn:

  1. Creating Queries using Keyword Query Language (KQL)
  2. Building dynamic queries
  3. Creating and customizing HTML Display Templates
  4. Building Search Driven Portals

Topic(s):

  1. Office365
  2. SharePoint

Audience :

  1. IT Pro

Time (in UTC) :

  1. Thursday, November 2 2017 5:00 PM

How to attend :

  1. Register here.
  2. At the time listed above go here to watch my session. (you can also add me to your own personal planner from the agenda.
  3. Be ready to take notes!

SharePoint 2013 Search Crawl Timeout Issue

​Implementing SharePoint 2013 in a secure zone as an extranet application might be challenging, if you are deploying your farm in a zone with many restrictions.

Recently, I deployed a large SharePoint 2013 farm in a DMZ zone for a regulated portal. Regulated data in my case meant the following restrictive rules in the network and on the servers in the farm:

  • Strict GPO Policies
  • WFE, Application, Search, and SQL servers are hosted in different subnet zones
  • Everything is blocked on the firewall unless specific ports are requested to be open
  • Outbound internet access is disabled on all servers.

Configuring SharePoint in this environment was not a straight forward exercise. After disabling some GPO policies to allow the creation of the IIS web applications, we had to map out the communication between all the servers so the firewall ports are open, allowing each server in the farm to talk to each other.

To get a better understanding of the ports required in your farm, you can follow this TechNet article. It explains the details of each port and its use.

Configuration SharePoint was successful; everything worked, the portals are up and running, content is being populated, User Profile Service Synchronization is working, and the Search Service Application is up and running.

However, I was faced with a very challenging issue when crawling content. Crawling the SharePoint content source always returned a "timeout" error in the logs. Resolving this issue took a lot log monitoring, custom code to monitor the traffic, and long nights.

This means that the search crawl is sending an HTTP request to your portal, but it is not receiving an answer back. The authentication is fine, security is OK, but there is no HTTP trip back to the crawl server.

There are my suggestions to a Search Crawl Timeout issue; one of the following suggestions might resolve your issue:

  1. Make sure you disable the loopback on the crawler server. In my case, this did not help at all.
  2. CRL Check: Most DLL assemblies are digitally signed.  Each time signed assemblies are loaded, default system behaviour is to check with the owner of the root certificate that the cert with which the assembly was signed is still valid. SharePoint 2013 search checks few certificates, like crl.microsoft.com or *.akamaitechnologies.com. To resolve this issue, open the outbound internet connection . If this is not doable, then install the crl.microsoft.com certificate on the server, or add an entry to local server host file like this: 127.0.0.1 crl.microsoft.com. This way certificate checks does not need to validate the certificate over the internet;
  3. Add exceptions on the firewall to allow traffic for the certificates; or
  4. Open Internet; or
  5. Revisit the firewall rules.

 

I suggest to first looking into the firewall rules again. 9 out of 1, it is the firewall that is doing funny things to block traffic between the servers. In my case, the security team were using Cisco Smart Care firewall, which is an advanced firewall and it does not only look at the ports' rules. You will have to create exception for applications, because it detects SharePoint and it automatically blocks it if SharePoint as an app is not listed as one of the trusted apps.