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Need to use a SharePoint intranet due to internal policies, company transitions, or legacy systems? When all the available information is overly technical or negative, where do you turn? Enter Fresh Perspectives: Living in the reality of SharePoint intranets. We provide useful, jargon-free insights and real-world examples to help you maximize the benefits of SharePoint intranets and tackle its challenges. Pro-SharePoint but realistic, we debunk misconceptions and share product management insights from Fresh Intranet.
Jarbas Horst [00:00:00]:
Welcome everyone. It's a new episode, isn't it? David? Hello.
David Bowman [00:00:17]:
Hello. Hi. Yes, hi. David Bowman. Almost forgot who I was then. David Bowman, Product Director for Fresh Intranet.
Jarbas Horst [00:00:24]:
It's a good start today. So I'm Jarbas Horst, Senior Product Manager for Fresh here at Advania UK and today we are talking about, and I think it's very provocative. Right, so SharePoint Internet Search. Why do you hate me? How do we come with like those titles? David, maybe you can help us here.
David Bowman [00:00:41]:
We were talking last week about this, my method of ice breaking with people at events where I say, you know, do you use SharePoint? Do you love SharePoint? And one of the main things that people say in response to, you know, when they say they don't really like SharePoint or they're not in love with SharePoint and one of the main reasons that people come back on this one is search and that people are having a, shall we say, a less than amazing experience using search in their SharePoint intranet. And I thought it would be worth just kind of digging into a bit of why this experience isn't great for people. We're going to talk about some of the challenges, why it's not working, how this presents itself in SharePoint and then obviously we're going to talk a little bit about what you can do about it with one pretty obvious conclusion that we're going to work up to in the episode today.
Jarbas Horst [00:01:32]:
Excellent. So we, we can start kind of with this introduction part and like talking about search and so what's happening and why people aren't getting what they want when it comes like to search in the context of the Internet.
David Bowman [00:01:46]:
Yes, yes. The way that the problem is articulated is search is awful. Results are from everywhere. The information that I'm getting back is not specific to my intranet and I think probably my least favorite, probably pushback on this is the sort of general articulations that people want some consumer grade experience for search.
Jarbas Horst [00:02:07]:
Maybe we can like, you know, iterate and go through each of those kind of problems that we hear from clients. And actually as you mentioned at the beginning, so when a lot of the discussions we have with people looking for a new intranet like to improve in their current Internet experience, search is one of the things that they want to improve, change, make better. So yeah, I think it's definitely worth us having this discussion and hopefully will also be valuable for people listening if we focus a bit like on those problems like you know, when it comes like the search being awful or like no, the results being like from everywhere. So what does that mean? Like in a little bit more detail.
David Bowman [00:02:44]:
I guess it difficult to show visually, but the experience that people are having with search in SharePoint or in any of the Microsoft 365 applications is you have the sweet nav bar, which is probably an outdated term that I'm using there, but you know, probably just demonstrates how long I've been doing stuff in Microsoft 365 for. And there is a little search box that sits in the middle of that bar in any of the Microsoft 365 applications. And you can tap something into that box, you'll get a bit of type ahead, it'll start suggesting things to you and that box has context of the application that you're currently using. So the sort of things that you're going to see in there are going to be different between outlook teams. SharePoint Power BI. Right. You know, wherever you are, you're going to get some level of context about the Microsoft 365 application that you're currently using. And when you're in a SharePoint intranet and you're tapping some things in that box, the result that you're getting can feel a little unpredictable because it changes depending on where you are in SharePoint.
David Bowman [00:03:38]:
Right. It's creating this perception that search is bad because it is a bit of a confusing experience of using that single search box across all of these different applications.
Jarbas Horst [00:03:50]:
It's called Microsoft Search. So it's not like a SharePoint search.
David Bowman [00:03:54]:
Yeah. Or Intranet search. Right. To be kind of specific about workload.
Jarbas Horst [00:03:57]:
That's a good point. Yeah, you mentioned workload. I like that. So now about containing the results you are getting from like just this workload which is the Internet, which by default is not the case. So it will give you everything.
David Bowman [00:04:11]:
Yes. The results will be contextual to SharePoint. Right. So you're getting results from SharePoint, but if your intranet that you've say you've got a kind of out of the box SharePoint intranet that's made up of a collection of different sites in there, your first point is going to be getting results from either the site, the hub, that list the library that you are currently in. So there's going to be some context to not just SharePoint but also the location that you're running the search from.
Jarbas Horst [00:04:35]:
That's a good point. It can also be very confusing. We'll get there and talk a bit more about that. And when we talked about so that the search should be similar to those consumer Experiences and a very common one is kind of the Google experience. What do you think about that?
David Bowman [00:04:52]:
This is a tough one. I think people kind of expect in this consumer grade experience when you say to them okay, so how many people in your organization are responsible for search? Right from either the outcomes from search, how the search interface works, what's the level of investment that the organization is putting into search? In 99% of cases the answer to that is zero. But at the same time what you're expecting is a kind of consumer grade experience like Google, multibillion dollar company, huge amount of investment going into all the different elements of search from the user interface to the back end, creating this kind of modern search experience which is now also being enhanced with AI. It's a difficult thing to have the same expectation that you're going to get a Google like experience effectively for free within your Microsoft 365 tenancy.
Jarbas Horst [00:05:38]:
Yeah, well, like, well definitely. So when we are discussing this with clients and you might have, as you mentioned, it's maybe this one 1% of clients will have then like a dedicated person managing well, not managing the entire search but like responsible one of their tasks is like search and like trying to improve that experience and like extending that. But that's the minority of the cases. Adding on what you mentioned. Right. So the expectation that people maybe might have nowadays on search, I'm not sure, like no. Is do we still like want a search that is similar to what Google provides? That would be a discussion like 3 years ago I think we would have like be in agreement, that's how it is. But now we have experience other forms of getting answers to the things that we're looking for and I'm looking here towards generative AI.
Jarbas Horst [00:06:24]:
So do you think that this could also be a direction where expectations of people would go?
David Bowman [00:06:30]:
Yeah, I think it's certainly. It's a changing area. Right. You know I think the way that I use search for example now has changed as you say, in the last three years with lots of different technologies. Depending on what I'm looking for, I will opt for different tools. Whereas previously I would have just started with. With Google I probably use Bing more, you know, as the default search engine. I can usually find what I want in that product.
David Bowman [00:06:52]:
But if I'm looking for any kind of research on a particular topic or I'm trying to get started on a new initiative, I will often go to ChatGPT as the sort of kind of my main port of call. If it's work related I'll stick to Using Copilot because they're the, they're the kind of tools that are in front of me. The way that people are searching I think is changing. I think if you work in tech, it's changing faster than if you are not working in tech. I think you'll end up with this kind of mixed experience of people in organizations needing something that is a better search. Probably a growing percentage of people that are going to be expecting answers rather than content.
Jarbas Horst [00:07:27]:
I like that because that's how the conventional search. Well, I'm mentioning conventional now how search has been so far. Like you, you get kind of the links to resources that might contain the answers. And usually like that's the case when we are looking at like the SharePoint search, the Google search, when that content that's available accurate and then we're using AI. So you are getting the answers directly, which. Well, I'm curious to see how this will evolve in the future. Right. So we'll be relying on AI to give us the answers.
Jarbas Horst [00:07:57]:
But yeah, see how that develops.
David Bowman [00:07:59]:
I think it's also worth just kind of making sure that we're clear on what it is that we are kind of criticizing a search feature that works inside of Microsoft 365. There's a distinction between this is enterprise search. Right. So when I'm typing things into that search box in a Microsoft 365 application, I'm able to tap into all the content that lives in Microsoft 365 in the tenancy that I'm in. And I think the challenge that people are having is not necessarily with enterprise search. The challenge is trying to use enterprise search in an intranet which is going to be a subset of the content that lives in Microsoft 365. So you know, I think for the purpose of this conversation I'm drawing a distinction between how people are finding content in Microsoft 365 versus how people are using search when they are in the context of an intranet. Right.
Jarbas Horst [00:08:47]:
Well, and you mentioned enterprise search. So like when we are talking about enterprise search now, we are looking at this one source of truth that as you mentioned, so we will not when we're building enterprise search now. So it's not just about the content from the Internet, but we also want to get results from like related applications, applications that are part of our digital workplace. Common applications are that we select with our clients like Confluence and servicenow also very common. And sometimes database like people come and bring like oh, we have data in the database that we would like to also have like Used access in that like from the search on the intranet. So that's where we are like looking at enterprise search and how this works.
David Bowman [00:09:26]:
Usually it can be a confusing thing to talk about and think about and plan for as well because you've got slightly different scenarios going on here. So if I relate this back to a use case within the Advania business. Our intranet provides intranet type functionality, right? News, content, tools, links, strategy, information from the organization, events of things that happening. We've got access to a bunch of information and content in there, but and all of that information lives in a series of SharePoint sites and it is walled off as being our intranet. But alongside the intranet workload and all the content and sites that are in there, we've also got a huge volume of Microsoft Teams of sites that have been created through Microsoft Teams. A lot of those have external sharing and content and information going to customers. We have contracts and a bunch of other sensitive information which has different levels of permissions and security. And as an employee I want to be able to tap into the content that lives in our intranet.
David Bowman [00:10:26]:
On occasion there are other occasions when I would need to be able to tap into the content that lives in all of those other sites that don't belong in the intranet. So I've got this kind of dual experience of search that I'm looking for finding things that belong in the intranet and finding things that are not intranet type content.
Jarbas Horst [00:10:41]:
It's the workload that you are referring to. So the Internet has one of the workloads and then you might also have different ones depending on the scenarios that you might have within your organization. And then trying to build this search in this way that we are going to find information across those different workloads. So the more specific you can be so the better this for the end users in the end because they know like what they're going to get when they start that search experience and that will give them information from that workload.
David Bowman [00:11:08]:
That criticism of the results aren't always relevant comes from this problem, right? Of as a user I'm in the intranet or I'm in a part of Microsoft 365 that I view as being the intranet. And when I run this search I've got content that's coming from places that are not the intranet, rather than saying to me there's no content in the intranet about that item that you've just looked for. What I'm getting is results from lots of other places because I've got permission to be able to see them. So I've got, you know, no rural way as a user of knowing whether this is content that's in the workload of the intranet or just general content that people are creating and using. In Microsoft 365 you have this aspect.
Jarbas Horst [00:11:47]:
And you mentioned before, right? So the, this same search box will, depending on where you start that from, like the search from will give you like different results. So. And you have kind of those different scopes.
David Bowman [00:12:00]:
Let's cover a few of them. So you're in an out of the box SharePoint site, which is designated as your home site, and you've got a homepage and you've got that search box at the top of the bar and you type something in there. What are you now looking at? Where are the results coming from?
Jarbas Horst [00:12:14]:
Yeah, so when you are like in the context of your home site and you trigger that search, so it will look across the entire content, right? So now if as you start moving down like within the site, if you go like into a library and we're looking for documents, or if you go into a list and we're looking for date within that list, so if we start a search from that space, it will just look for information within the list or within the library.
David Bowman [00:12:40]:
There's a subtle indicator there, isn't there? So if you switch from a site to a library, there is a label change in that search box which says, I think it says something like search in SharePoint or search in site or search in list.
Jarbas Horst [00:12:52]:
Yes, exactly. So search this list, search this site. And it's logical like the way how it's built, there is a logic in there which might be confusing, but it has a certain logic, right? So you are within the list, you start to search, right? So okay, so you are looking for information within that list, you have that tab open and then suddenly you want to find some information and then you trigger like you still have the same context list and the search box. You go into search box and you type something because you want to find information within SharePoint within your intranet and it will again just look within that list. So that's where I think it can become confusing for users.
David Bowman [00:13:28]:
It's putting quite a lot of knowledge on the shoulders of the user to know the difference between these pieces of SharePoint architecture, right. If as an employee you are somewhat familiar with the concept of the intranet, right? So you've opened the browser, you're in the company's intranet, you're looking for Information, you aren't necessarily thinking about what a site is, what a list is, what a library is, what a hub site is. Yeah. When you're in the intranet, it's requiring that the end user understands a little bit about how SharePoint is architected in order to be able to get the results that they're looking for. And I think that's a pretty tough expectation to have.
Jarbas Horst [00:14:03]:
It is like, oh, as users, you are in the flow of your work. You need like to start thinking, I'm just looking for a policy document. Yes. Like, you need to start, like to think, how can I find information? Or like, how can I use the search to find information? And not just like. And that's going back to Google. You have the same search box and you enter something and then it will come with the results. Right. So you don't need to understand how do I operate the search system to get like the result.
David Bowman [00:14:28]:
That's an important distinction there. That coming at this from the user's perspective rather than from an engineering perspective. Right. The user's in the intranet and there is a search box. They're typing in a search term for. They are used to using search tools and they're somewhat familiar with how the results will be working. So they will be expecting at least some level of relevant information based on what they have keyed into the search field. And when they don't see that the response is going to be our search doesn't work.
Jarbas Horst [00:14:58]:
Yes. Which might not be necessarily the case. Right. So you have a functional search and it has been configured properly, but it's more people don't understand how to use that. So scoping is one of the challenges, I think. And then if you are at a site level, so you are not like now in a, a library and you trigger the search, so you then get redirected to a different experience that's completely like different from SharePoint. Right. So dedicated, like it's Microsoft search dedicated search experience.
David Bowman [00:15:27]:
And that's different branding as well. Potentially.
Jarbas Horst [00:15:30]:
Potentially. Exactly. Now you might have like customize your, your SharePoint with custom fonts. And of course, like, you know, we have like different theme colors that you can apply like to your out of the box SharePoint as well. And then you will be landing in a different place. That can be confusing as well. Plus you have also the option of navigating this search structure where you can go from the site to the hub, from the hub to the entire organizational data. And that also means always you are moving from one scope to the other.
Jarbas Horst [00:16:02]:
Which can, I think be for the users. Also a bit overwhelming if you are not, as you mentioned, if you don't understand the architecture and all of those stems as well.
David Bowman [00:16:10]:
Because SharePoint has the potential for multiple workloads. So an intranet, a knowledge management system, some project sites, some team sites, a document management platform, Microsoft Teams, informal communities. There's a whole bunch of use cases that could be creating SharePoint content in this thing. Search ultimately doesn't really understand where the walls are between these workloads.
Jarbas Horst [00:16:35]:
Right.
David Bowman [00:16:35]:
It's treating everything, as long as you have permission to be able to see it. Everything has some level of equivalent weighting.
Jarbas Horst [00:16:42]:
Yes. So it could be used for different use cases you mentioned. So I think that's where the challenge that people maybe have in the end, because the search could be used for different scenarios, as we have just mentioned, but you want that for something specific. And that's where I think the challenges are.
David Bowman [00:16:57]:
Yes. And left out of the box, the search results aren't going to be. Don't understand where the intranet begins and where the intranet ends, or where the document management system begins or ends, or where the knowledge management system begins or ends. The search isn't intelligent in that way. To understand this content is just intranet. It's not giving you results on the basis of a defined workload.
Jarbas Horst [00:17:19]:
You need to do something about that to change it.
David Bowman [00:17:22]:
Speaking of doing something about it, there are options to be able to do something about it. So there is a thing called the search. Is it the search and intelligence center in Microsoft Admin? So that exists as a kind of admin center of its own rather than being something that's configured as part of SharePoint. And there's quite a lot in there, but it requires that you've got some level of advanced permissions or you have a buddy in it that you can go and talk to. We'll come on to the configuration options because the thing I just wanted to pick up on is one of the other things that you can do about search and that you probably should be doing about search is spending some time on content governance.
Jarbas Horst [00:18:01]:
Definitely. Well, you know, if the results, let's say you have done all of the configurations and now people not getting kind of the good results, then it's where governance helps to improve that quality. And it's a work that you would do and it would not just be for search. So when you have things like Copilot also in place, it's also an area that will benefit from that content being in a good quality I remember being.
David Bowman [00:18:26]:
A young SharePoint consultant at some stage, believe it or not, that was a point in time. And governance was always felt like a sort of that kind of confusing term that seemed to mean different things to different people. What's under this umbrella of governance? What are the sort of things that people could be doing to improve the quality of their content?
Jarbas Horst [00:18:44]:
I think it's like adding, putting rules in place that help you maintain your content. That's one of the things you can definitely do. Right. And creating overviews of your content. But like if we start looking at SharePoint in general, right. So it's a bit harder to get an overview of all of the content that you have. So if you're looking at our content pages for example, or of course our documents and the policies and the guides and the templates, so that might distribute it across multiple sites in a larger organization.
David Bowman [00:19:16]:
We could be talking about hundreds or thousands of sites.
Jarbas Horst [00:19:18]:
Yes, like your department sites. And we might have a kind of the main site maybe like when I look at the structure of an Internet, for example, and how do you bring all of that in an overview? I think unfortunately where by default SharePoint doesn't have that option, but then creating that overview, I think it's the first step and then having good ways of also structuring that information provide like thinking like display, like oh, who is the content owner for that content and then starting looking at how can I automate that content management. So having a review date, an expiration date for the content, ideally you have like some automation in place looking at like power automate, creating a workflow that helps you do that automatically. But I think the at least part is like having an overview where you can see like what is that content, what does that look like?
David Bowman [00:20:07]:
The best options, I think as you say, for kicking off a content governance initiative are generally going to require that you're using some third-party tools.
Jarbas Horst [00:20:16]:
I think so as well. Because if out of the box is not providing the options, then I think it would be a lot of configuration work and that across multiple places, multiple sites, where you need to go and configure things individually, add the metadata to different places and then creating kind of this, I like to work with automation this space because that can speed up and help people kind of get reminders and ideally also like having some archiving place. Right. Because if people don't end up like doing anything with that content, so then you have a process in place for that as well.
David Bowman [00:20:50]:
We talked a bit with Kai from Swoop analytics on an episode recently about the kind of importance of this topic and how overwhelming it can feel. You know, if you have a SharePoint intranet or SharePoint in general, which has been left unmanaged for a long time, maybe with a bit of chaotic growth, lots of sites, lots of content owned or created by people that have left the organization a while ago, getting on top of this can feel like a real tough job somewhere where third party tools can definitely help. But even just getting started on this, right, of being able to identify sites that are no longer being used, finding content that is old, outdated, not owned by anyone, and maybe if you're not feeling brave enough to delete it, moving off to archived areas, they're kind of just some simple, tangible things that people can do to get started on a.
Jarbas Horst [00:21:42]:
Governance initiative using a third-party solution. Well, we provide as fresh, right? So the different tools that help with the content governance on the Internet. Alternatively, you could maybe be looking at something different from. There is a community solution that people could be using to create overviews as well from the PNP initiative that could also be used.
David Bowman [00:22:03]:
And then as far as configuring search, then we've got the Search Intelligence center which lives in the Microsoft 365 admin, which you may or may not have access to. The challenge for lots of people that we speak to, if you're in internal comms or your intranet manager that isn't necessarily in the IT department, you probably won't have access to this and you're left kind of trying to get a task on somebody else's to do list.
Jarbas Horst [00:22:26]:
Yes. So we were talking to a client the other day and the person mentioned that when it comes to collaborating with different teams in the organization, that can become like complicated. Right. So you are part of the comms team and you just have access to your intranet in SharePoint and now you want to perform tasks that will require an administrator or you want maybe to automate a specific piece of work and then you might require the team that's working kind of on power automate. You need to then start maybe get an approval, get kind of additional support from people and that might not be their priority. So that's where things might become more complicated. When you have those scenarios where you need to go to different system, maybe different area of the system that require kind of elevated privileges. So that can become a bit more complicated.
David Bowman [00:23:13]:
I think this is certainly one area where getting search right is important. The challenge I think in this area is that it can be a bit of a battle trying to get these sort of admin changes made. Changes that you're making in the Search and Intelligence center are going to have an effect on lots of different workloads that are in Microsoft 365 and SharePoint, not just the intranet you're using. Enterprise Search changes you're making here are going to apply to enterprise Search across the organization. These changes can't be just limited to your intranet workload. If that's all you're responsible for, you could have this battle to try to get changes made and get buy in or budget or whatever it is that you need to do to be able to get access to this configuration center or have someone sit with you while you get access to this configuration center to discover that the things that you can do are maybe going to get you some of the way to the answers that you're looking for, but probably aren't going to give you exactly what you need either.
Jarbas Horst [00:24:06]:
Yeah, well, the Search Intelligence center comes with a lot of configuration options. So if we start looking at the enterprise search aspect, where you want to have data that goes beyond just SharePoint and OneDrive, so you have kind of the connectors that you can use, like some available by default for Microsoft and you can also build your own connectors, but that's where you can then bring that data like From Confluence and WordPress and your database that might contain a lot of information.
David Bowman [00:24:33]:
There is a lot of power here, isn't there, of being able to bring that third party data into Enterprise Search as additional tabs inside the search experience. And you know, it feels to me that this is one area that probably companies don't make enough use of. Some of those additional connectors, there's a kind of premium value on them. But there's a reasonable chunk in there that are included with Microsoft 365.
Jarbas Horst [00:24:54]:
Yeah, definitely. And that's, I think, connectors for tools that people are already using, like ServiceNow for example. So it's a good way of bringing everything in this one search experience. And when you are searching for information, you don't need to go to different applications. So you could get everything from this one place. That's powerful.
David Bowman [00:25:13]:
There's also some functionality for things like bookmarks and Q&A. If you've got an organization acronym finder that you can have that information centrally stored so that when people are looking for acronyms or there's a particular term that you want them to find, find a specific bookmark or resource for you can embed those things so that when people are typing those phrases in, they will find this content specifically.
Jarbas Horst [00:25:37]:
Yeah, that's really good. And locations are also supported as part of this. Part of the Searchlan type information. Yeah, no, it is very useful for the employees. So you need to of course, spend a bit of time configuring and maintaining all the different keywords that map with the bookmarks and Q&A and so on. But that's something you can do to enhance the quality of the results that people get and which might get them closer to the information that they are looking for.
David Bowman [00:26:08]:
The other area that's probably worth spending a little time on is the verticals that you can create. So in the search results field, when you Type something into SharePoint, you end up in the search page and you've got these different verticals. And this option in the Search Intelligence center allows you to create custom verticals.
Jarbas Horst [00:26:26]:
Right, That's a very good point. You can define then like different type of information or data that you would like to bring to users. It comes with a very advanced query builder functionality. Like there is this term kql.
David Bowman [00:26:41]:
You got to know what you're doing.
Jarbas Horst [00:26:42]:
Yes, yes. You need to know what you are doing to be able to really build a strong query that will then kind of bring the results from different sites, maybe on different places of Your, let's say SharePoint Internet in this one place.
David Bowman [00:26:56]:
The kind of thing that you could do with that, in theory, right. As long as you're able to write in the language that it needs you to write in, is that you could in theory create a vertical that had a collection of sites that made up your intranet. Right. So that when people landed in search on that search results page, they could click on a tab on that search results page called something like Intranet Content. And that could be pulling content from the sites that are made up in your intranet. So you've got a way really of being able to provide this definition of here's the results from my workload in the intranet. But I guess the challenge there that every time you add a new site, you've got to go back and update that index.
Jarbas Horst [00:27:34]:
Yeah. Depending on how like your Internet is structured. Yes, definitely. That would be an exercise like continuous maintenance. That would need to happen. You can also have refinement options as part of this search vertical. It's one search vertical, one tab along like among many others, it's this aspect, as we always like to consider that.
David Bowman [00:27:54]:
Point about you can get close to the outcome that most people will be looking for here. But it's probably not going to give you exactly what you need and may shoot some way under your requirement for an intranet search.
Jarbas Horst [00:28:06]:
It's the nice thing about Microsoft 365. There are always a lot of configuration options that you can apply. You need like to spend the time then like understanding and you can hire of course like a consultancy, like a company like to perform that on your behalf. And that's like. Because Microsoft 365 is so extensible, there are tools like ours that come and solve that.
David Bowman [00:28:28]:
Part of that and as a kind of ham fisted point that we could make on the podcast, right, is that we've built a solution for all of these problems in fresh. We have our own intranet search that has been created off the back of having all of these conversations, a challenge articulated to us from customers. So what we've created is effectively an intranet workload search within the product which has a roadmap. It's being enhanced with AI, lots of other things. You have an option then to build something yourself using some technologies that are kind of supported in the community. It's somewhat official from Microsoft. So you can buy something like Fresh for example. You could build something or find an organization that's going to build something in search for you as well, couldn't you? That's also an alternative.
Jarbas Horst [00:29:12]:
Definitely. And that's because Microsoft S5 is so flexible. So you have those options. Right. You can build that yourself if you have the time, if you have the resource internally, if maybe you want to hire someone from that.
David Bowman [00:29:23]:
And the appetite for risk.
Jarbas Horst [00:29:25]:
Yes, definitely. And you need to, you know, you are building that, you need also to keep maintaining it. Right. So no doubt about that. Now you could also take the shortcut and buy a solution that has already implemented it and is further developing that based like on real scenarios that the clients like are presenting.
David Bowman [00:29:41]:
We talked at the beginning that enterprise search, the enterprise search that's Provided In Microsoft 365 in all the different applications is not a solution for specific workload search. So if you, you know, you have this enterprise search, you have an intranet search. The two things aren't necessarily the same thing.
Jarbas Horst [00:29:59]:
Yes, again, so the search by default will be looking across your entire SharePoint OneDrive. Right. That's the date. It's like retrieving and if you want now like to have something specific, that's where you need like to buy. There are options. Right. So buying something that's ready is one of the options by the way, like why did we then build a Search in fresh.
David Bowman [00:30:20]:
I think the search feature that we created was based on all of this type of feedback from people not enjoying the enterprise search feature for their intranet. We had a number of conversations at the time about are we adding more confusion in here by having two slightly different searches? But the feedback that we had was it was valid to have an intranet search in the global nav of the intranet and it's valid to have access to enterprise search. Again, kind of relating this to my own world. I'm in the intranet and I am navigating around the intranet and then I need to find a template or a statement of work or some client facing document that doesn't belong in the intranet. I need to be able to use enterprise search to be able to find that content. If enterprise search isn't available to me in the intranet, I've then got to go somewhere else in order to initiate this other search. We have an intranet search, we have an enterprise search.
Jarbas Horst [00:31:12]:
You could also go and hide the Microsoft search bar. So you could, technically that's possible. So you could hide that. There is a PowerShell. Then this becomes very technical. So no worries, you don't need ask your IT people, they will be able to help with that. So there is an option, unfortunately there is no UI for this. So that's something I find not ideal.
Jarbas Horst [00:31:32]:
But yeah, so there is an option to hide that bar or as you mentioned. Right. So there are the use cases where you want to have the access to both. So the Internet search and the entire organizational data search.
David Bowman [00:31:45]:
Yeah. And obviously we think the best option if you're looking for a solution to this problem is to buy fresh. Second best, maybe third best option is that you could build something yourself that comes along with all of the risk of building additional features within SharePoint. I've sat in numerous presentations from customers at events where they're showcasing this out of the box SharePoint intranet. And when you speak to them afterwards you say how do you and how do you find the search experience in your out of the box SharePoint? More often than not they say well that is actually the one thing that we did customize that we created a custom search feature for our intranet. So I think particularly in large enterprise organizations this tends to be they need a specific search.
Jarbas Horst [00:32:25]:
One thing that I think we didn't mention yet, like is what I miss when it comes like to the search experience is there is no web part, no component by Microsoft, like out of the box that you can add to a page in SharePoint to create like a specific search experience in that place.
David Bowman [00:32:42]:
In theory, having like a homepage that looks a bit like Google or Bing. Right. Intranet search as being the only thing that's on that page.
Jarbas Horst [00:32:48]:
Unfortunately, there is like no web part or ways that you can start a search experience from a page in SharePoint. Right. Always how you can like build a search experience where you have like your search box and like following such results. So that's unfortunately not not available by default.
David Bowman [00:33:05]:
All right. Well, we will leave it there for this week. Good to see you, sir.
Jarbas Horst [00:33:09]:
Likewise. Thanks, David.