Thursday, June 24, 2021

Announcing developer preview of the Microsoft Federated Search Platform

The amount of information we create has grown exponentially and more often is distributed across multiple locations, making finding the right information, at the right time, increasingly difficult. One solution to this challenge is to merge your on-premises information with your information in Microsoft 365, but occasionally business requirements, corporate and/or regulatory compliance, or other constraints may limit the ability to merge or store data in the cloud.

 

The new Microsoft Federated Search Platform is designed specifically for these scenarios.  The Microsoft Federated Search Platform enables you to build custom federated search providers to allow your information to participate in Microsoft Search’s Answers & Vertical experiences without the need for merging that information with your Microsoft 365 index - while still letting you use familiar Microsoft Search apps and services to include SharePoint, Office.com and Microsoft Bing.

 

The Microsoft Federated Search Platform lets you:

  • Build a custom search provider or bring your existing bot (developed using Microsoft Bot framework protocol 4.0) and register it via the Azure Developer Portal
  • Add trigger phrases for your provider for the most common query patterns used to search over your data to get high precision Answers in the All vertical
  • Define Adaptive Cards UX to render your search results in the Answer card and custom vertical
  • Use the Search & intelligence admin center to enable your custom search providers for your  employees

 

Today we're extending an invitation to enroll in our upcoming private preview of the Microsoft Federated Search Developer Platform (opening later this Summer) where you can try out this new experience.

 

As part of our private preview program, we'll provide a federated search provider sample which you can download and customize for your specific scenarios using the Bot Framework SDK. 

 

Once customized and deployed you'll be able to register it with our platform using the Azure Developer Portal providing its provider icon, name, trigger phrases, Answers & Vertical settings, etc.).  This will allow you to register your provider with Microsoft Search and publish it for your tenant admin for review and approval. 

 

When enabled, employees in your organization will be to search results from your provider alongside your Microsoft 365 information in Microsoft Search.

 

If you're interested in enrolling in this private preview, complete the form at https://aka.ms/SearchDevPrivatePreview.

 

You can learn more about our plans for federated search and view a demonstration at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZcOskBTwNU.

Posted at https://sl.advdat.com/3wOR2tH