Microsoft intranet search

Microsoft Search is turned on by default for all Microsoft apps that supports it, as a part of Microsoft There is no setup required, but you can improve the overall Microsoft Search experience through some basic administrative tasks.

As an admin you should consider a few things that can make the Microsoft Search experience efficient and user friendly in your organization. Currently, the Search admin and Search editor roles must be assigned by a global admin. For more information, see Assign admin roles. Search administrators directly influence the search experience for end users. This includes choosing the types of results you want to surface to your users.

It may be difficult for one person to choose and create authoritative content on many different topics that users search for in an organization. We recommend that you leverage the expertise and knowledge of subject matter experts SME and other users by adding them as Search editors.

Microsoft Search provides administrators with tools that they can use to build a robust search experience for their users. In Microsoft Search, administrators have three different search contents that they can create for a better search experience and to improve the "findability" of content:. You will use this information to identify initiatives for your intranet. Using the information you gathered during your research, work with your key intranet stakeholders to identify initiatives that reflect your organizational priorities — as well as any barriers that might exist when you are implementing them.

While you may ultimately implement solutions to address all of the identified initiatives, prioritizing which project to do first will help you achieve early success and user engagement as efficiently as possible.

Analyze each initiative for its positive impact on your users with respect to the ease of implementation. A high impact initiative that can be built with a minimum of customization can be an ideal first project. Consider plotting your business initiatives on a grid, like the following, and review with your intranet stakeholders and IT department to choose the best option to start with.

To help decide which initiative to address first, work with the business leaders for that area to work out the objectives for the solution, who will be responsible for driving success in this area, and the metrics that you'll use to measure success.

Think about actual business impact. For example:. Work with the owner of each scenario to determine what an ideal solution would look like to them:. For example, create a table like the following to list business scenarios that you want to address with intranet sites across your organization:.

After you have compiled this information, create a design brief to help map out the user journey about how you want the site to operate. For the scenario that you've decided to build, choose the components that you'll need to use to meet the site's business objectives.

We recommend creating a rapid prototype, and granting access to your key stakeholders. This provides a substantive framework for further discussions and revisions of the design. At this stage, we recommend that you involve your help desk so that they are prepared to answer questions after the site rolls out to a larger audience. For best practices for launching an intranet site, review Creating and launching a healthy SharePoint portal.

When the prototype has evolved to a point where you want to share it more broadly, you can roll it out to a pilot group, or even to the whole organization. User adoption is a critical part of success for a new intranet site. To drive site usage, we recommend that you use both a top down and bottom up approach:. As the site rolls out and more users engage, watch your success metrics and make adjustments as needed to drive additional engagement and user satisfaction.

When the site is on its way to success, take stock of any lessons learned in the process and proceed on to the next intranet project that you want to undertake. Skip to main content. This browser is no longer supported. Download Microsoft Edge More info. Contents Exit focus mode. Is this page helpful? Please rate your experience Yes No. That process included important tasks that should be carried out on all large or complex sites:.

When necessary, we create web parts to suit our needs in SharePoint. Custom web parts help us provide a directed and comprehensive user experience without sacrificing user experience or design elements. We always consider reusability when we create new web parts. If we can use a web part for other parts of the organization or fulfill a need in other sites, we want to design it in a way that allows for reuse.

We have many web parts that are built with a more general and broad approach in mind that are reused—and potentially customized—in different places throughout our SharePoint site landscape. The greatest benefit of the migration to modern sites has been reduced requirement for development and IT intervention.

Our users can now create attractive, useful, accessible, and responsive sites using default tools and site-creation processes.

Our business groups are driving their own site creation and design, and they can maintain more current and complete sites with less effort. The process of migrating our intranet publishing sites to SharePoint in Office is ongoing. Every day, we draw closer to our goal of migrating every last publishing site to SharePoint.

As we do, we unlock new time and cost savings while providing our organization with attractive, useful, accessible, and responsive intranet sites. This document is for informational purposes only. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

Share this page. The SharePoint landscape at Microsoft SharePoint has a long history of being the primary collaboration platform for our intranet and extranet solutions at Microsoft. Traditional design and deployment For years, SharePoint was designed to provide a starter platform on which interesting sites could be built. Although powerful, the default, out-of-box sites had some shortcomings: The default site template was nondescript and basic.

If site owners wanted to build an attractive site, they had to go above and beyond the default template. This meant extra work for developers and extra steps in the publishing process. Customization was developer intensive.

Customization of site functionality, navigation elements, and design required developer involvement. Achieving a user experience that the business would be happy with required a heavy investment in the configuration and customization of master pages, CSS, JavaScript, and web parts.

Sites were not responsive by default. The traditional site types were designed for a PC browser, and the mobile rendering of traditional sites often produced unattractive or partially nonfunctional results on mobile devices. Sites were not accessible by default. Meeting accessibility standards required design and developer effort. Our move to the cloud Microsoft has been a cloud-first organization since Cloud-based collaboration provides several essential advantages: All sites and tools are in one service, from one vendor.

Personal and business sites are all within the same administrative and functional scope. All sites are designed, developed, and managed with the same toolset and in the same environment. Hybrid cloud content management Our current environment is hybrid by design, but the vast majority of our SharePoint sites are now hosted in SharePoint Online. Enabling self-service and creative collaboration Self-service site creation lowers barriers to effective collaboration, so we make it possible for all of our users to provision sites to meet their business needs.

Our approach to modernization consists of the following key elements: Shift to modern sites as our default site types. Though we enable self-service site provisioning for our end users, we now allow the provisioning of only modern site types: groups-connected team sites and communication sites. All of our development is SharePoint Framework. Whether the customization is being built for a new site or an existing classic site, we require that all of our new customizations are built using SPFx.

SPFx web parts function in both classic and modern site types, easing the transition to modern by reducing future rework. Hubs give us the ability to aggregate sites by purpose, division, region, or business unit.

The hub gives a business function or division control over its own identity through consistent theming and navigation while also centralizing search across all of the sites connected to the hub.

Site designs. Advances in site designs allow us to automate the site-provisioning process to build sites appropriate to the business need faster than ever before. Using automation, we can install web parts, create lists and libraries, and launch Power Automate flows, for example. Audience targeting. With new, advanced audience-targeting features, we can target both content and navigation elements to specific audiences based on legacy or modern security groups.

In doing so, we make the content more relevant to the user, improving engagement, usability, and satisfaction. Cross-suite integration. Cross-suite integration in SharePoint is as easy as ever.

Through useful, out-of-box web parts, our most compelling sites now integrate content from across the suite. Embedded content from Stream and Yammer improve user interactivity, capability, and engagement.