[Updated: Oct 30, 2020]
With the introduction of Microsoft Search in Office 365, we have more and more new features released. In this series, I’m going to introduce these basic, out-of-the-box configuration and customization options.
The first thing that everyone has to know about is the Bookmarks and Q&A. Let me show you what these are.
Administering Microsoft Search
To start working with Microsoft Search Administration, follow these steps:
- Go to Microsoft 365 Admin Center (tenant administration).
- Click on “Show All…” to expand all settings and configuration options on the left side menu.
- Open Settings / Search & Intelligence.
You’ll find all the available settings and insights for Microsoft Search here.
Microsoft Search roles
In Office 365, there are the following roles who can manage and administer Microsoft Search:
- Tenant Administrator: can administer every feature and setting of Microsoft Search.
- Microsoft Search Administrator: can administer every feature and setting of Microsoft Search.
- Microsoft Search Editor: can add/edit/delete Bookmarks, Locations, Q&A, etc.
Bookmarks
Bookmarks can be considered as the new, “modern” way to create promoted results.
The bookmarks are displayed in SharePoint, Office.com, as well as Bing if the query matches any of the keywords (“search” here, see more details below):
A few practical use cases when bookmarks can be useful:
- Apps like timesheet, travel expenses, etc.
- Forms and templates.
- Policies, procedures, and guidelines.
- Keywords in the organization’s glossary.
- Etc.
Creating Bookmarks
Each bookmark has a few default settings:
- Title: The title of your bookmark.
- URL: The URL where the bookmark points to.
- Bookmark description: Free text description of the bookmark.
- Keywords: Search terms commonly used, to trigger the bookmark to be displayed.
- Reserved keywords: Must be unique. If a reserved keyword is matched, it will override all other keywords. If you want to make sure that this shows up for a particular keyword, make that a reserved keyword.
Bookmarks also have several advanced settings, to further enrich user targeting (which users should see the bookmarks, when, from which device, etc.):
- Dates
- Country or region
- Groups
- Device & OS
- Targeted variations
Last but not least (one of my favorite ones): we can also display PowerApps as bookmark. (I’m planning to write a separate blog post about this option later, as this can make search even more powerful!)
In this series
Stay tuned, more to come later as we have more and more options in Microsoft Search.
Hello 🙂
any information about the Location option? It seems that you can not have a “Location” and a “Bookmark” using the same Keyword.. the Bookmark seems to have priority and the location wont be showed in the search results.
Thanks!
Hi Erika,
The priotiry of keywords is Bookmarks > Q&A > Locations.
This means, if a Bookmark and a Q&A share the same keyword, the Bookmark is displayed. Similarly, if a Q&A and a Location share the same keyword, the Q&A is displayed.
In your case, if a Bookmark and a Location share the same keyword, the Bookmark is displayed.
I hope this helps.
Hi Agnes
I have recently taken on a Search Administrator role and I am trying to understand how the “suggested bookmarks” in Search & Intelligence are generated. Can you help with this?
There seem to be 3 categories:
1. Recommended;Sharepoint
All system generated, all with title and URL. No keywords suggested.
(I assume these are pages that are coming up frequently in search results and the system is therefore suggesting we should consider whether to bookmark them.)
2. Microsoft suggests;Microsoft Recommends
Not described as system generated (so what does system generated mean?); title but no URL. Include keywords.
(I assume these are words or phrases that are frequently used in search queries and Microsoft is therefore suggesting we should consider whether we need to find relevant pages to bookmark.)
3. No categories identified
Not described as system generated but also no indication of who is suggesting them (except in one case where a test account is identified). Provide title but no URL. Include keywords.
(These entries seem to be identifying related terms in general, as in a thesaurus, rather than anything related to our content specifically. As a class, they seem least worthy to be published as bookmarks.)
Thank you.
Hi Agnes, do you know if there is a way to bulk delete bookmarks again?
BR Thomas
Your advance customized option is too good and easy to understand. thanks for sharing the amazing content with us.
Thank you for your feedback! 🙂