This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Microsoft Search Blog articles.
At Ignite last year in Orlando, we shared our progress and continued innovation for personalized, contextual search across Microsoft 365, to bring intelligent search and discovery experiences directly to you – where you’re already working, surfacing people, information, and insights across Microsoft 365 and connected systems with our Microsoft Graph connectors. We recognize that organizations have a wealth of data in other third-party services and applications. Boundary-less search is only as good as the sources it has access to.
Expanding Preview to Targeted Release Customers
Today, we’re delighted to announce that we are expanding the preview of connectors to all customers in Targeted Release. Over the next few weeks, any customer who has selected the Targeted Release option will be able to start trying connector functionality. Once rolled out to your tenant, you will be able to see the Connectors tab on Microsoft 365 admin center > Settings > Microsoft Search page.
With over 130 connectors available, we have received very strong customer interest since we started the preview last November. Thank you for providing us with your feedback during the past several months. We have made many bug fixes and added new features based on your input.
New Preview Connectors & Features
We will be rolling out 2 new connectors and several new features to all our preview customers over the next couple of months. In addition to the 6 Microsoft-built connectors, we are adding 2 new connectors – Azure SQL and Azure DevOps. Administrators will be able to select which connectors they wish to use for their organizations based on which investments they’ve already made in third-party applications. Further extensibility with APIs will also be possible. Organizations will be able customize the search sources and the display of search results with custom refiners and verticals, and control the display of how sources of information look in result pages.
In addition to bringing new connectors to Microsoft Search, we’re continuously building on our connector platform to enable you to create rich new scenarios through the information in your connected systems.
Enhanced Connectors Search Experiences
We have enhanced the search experience with core features like refiners support, alias support, and search result snippet. Any connector data can take advantage of Adaptive Cards to create rich result type UX on the search result page. Ranking and relevance has been improved to help you find what you are looking for faster.
Improved Administrative Experiences
The administrative experience for Microsoft Graph connectors has been improved to help you better understand your connector index usage and to provide a more consistent experience across Microsoft-built connectors and third-party connectors.
Improved Developer Experiences
The Graph connector platform provides open APIs for you to develop connectors for any data source you choose. The indexing API is now unified around a single externalItem entity type to provide a simplified developer experience. The API has been enhanced to support a new labels feature to let you define the semantics of your properties so the indexed data can be participate in richer search and Graph experiences.
What’s Next?
As we head towards general availability, we will continue to listen to your feedback to enhance Microsoft Search and Graph connectors. We are targeting to have Graph connectors reach general availability this year, and we look forward to sharing more with you at Ignite 2020. We will continue to work with our partners to ensure wherever your data resides, you can bring it to Microsoft 365, delivering search experiences across the apps and services you use everyday.
You can learn more about Microsoft Graph connectors at https://aka.ms/MicrosoftSearch/Connectors.