The service was unveiled during Microsoft’s business-focused Ignite conference in Orlando today. It’s coming to most existing Office 365 subscriptions under a private preview program. According to Microsoft, Bing can help companies be more efficient by offering “intelligent search” that combines several different data sources into a single combined view.
Searching on Bing for Business will offer a lot more than simple web results. It’ll surface information from across your organisation, such as recent documents, shared files, team sites and emails. The content’s presented as cards at the top of the search results, putting the business data at the forefront of your view when you visit search.
Microsoft’s strategy here is to help businesses save time and be more efficient by offering a single place to find resources. Instead of having a different search bar for each app, Bing can act as a centralised information gatherer to present data from all of Office 365. Users don’t need to visit another site or page to get business-specific information. Instead, they just search the web like normal and have the content delivered to them.
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Microsoft’s also claiming significant benefits for system administrators. Bing for Business integrates with existing admin controls so it can be controlled by enterprise IT managers. Search traffic is protected to prevent business listings leaking onto the wider Internet. There’s also options to add custom branding, giving organisations the ability to retain their own identity.
“For end users, we wanted to create an offering that can increase productivity by getting them the relevant contextual information as quickly as possible. For administrators, we wanted to provide something that is easy to deploy and manage, offers enhanced protection for business search traffic while reducing costs associated with help desk calls,” said Microsoft. “Bing for business provides these benefits to users and administrators with quick and seamless access to internal company information directly within Bing’s web results while keeping the results protected.”
The service is powered by artificial intelligence and the Microsoft Graph, Microsoft’s all-encompassing centralised API. It lets search pull in data from every corner of Office 365, ranging from entire SharePoint team sites to single words in documents. It’s also connected to Microsoft’s data analytics tools such as Power BI and Delve, providing more insight into what teams are looking for.
Bing for Business is available in private preview to Office 365 Enterprise, Business and Education customers. To get access, you have to request an invitation. Microsoft said it intends to head towards general availability next year.
