Hi All,

In this article we will discuss administrator settings available to for Microsoft Search feature.

In the last article “Office 365 – Microsoft Search is available for Bing search – Allows our Office 365 users, groups, SharePoint documents and sites, conversation from Microsoft Teams, Conversation from yammer on Bing.com. – Part 1” we have discussed the Microsoft Search feature and some example. In this article we will discuss the administrative settings for the “Microsoft Search”.

We discussed that there is tenant level setting for enabling / disabling the future. There is also “Microsoft Search admin tool” available to manage few settings or search experience.

Option to launch the setting is from same location where we enable / disable the “Activate Microsoft Search” setting (Home > Service & add-ins > Microsoft Search) as shown in below figure:

Figure 1: Office 365 – Microsoft Search – Option for launching “Microsoft Search admin tool”

From above figure 1, we have option in Step 1 ”Activate Microsoft Search” to turn on / off the option to search in bing search. In Step 2, we have option to launch the “Microsoft Search admin tool”.

Or alternatively we can directly go through URL – https://www.bingforbusiness.com/admin we need to login with our Office 365 tenant account. We will see admin portal will be launched as

Figure 2: Office 365 – Microsoft Search Admin Portal

In right side we will see various setting options such as Dashboard, Bookmarks, Q&As, Users & permissions, Connected services, Content Settings and tools.

Following are couple of important settings which we will discuss now from the Microsoft search admin portal:

Users & Permissions: UI for setting the access to the users for Microsoft Search. We can manage preview users as

Figure 3: Office 365 – Microsoft Search – Managing preview users

If we don’t want give permissions to all users, we deselect the option “Add everyone in your organization” and add set of users or security groups as shown in above figure 3.

Connected services: Which services to get in search like “People”, “Groups”, “Sharepoint”, “Microsoft Teams” and “Yammer” as shown in below figure:

Figure 4: Office 365 – Microsoft Search – Office 365 services in allowed in bing search

By default, all above services are turned on but depending on our organization need we can turn off the respective settings.

For example, my organization won’t allow to search Groups or Microsoft Teams conversation or so. Or some other organization may only allow to search SharePoint and Peoples.

Thanks for reading 🙂

Keep reading, share your thoughts, experiences. Feel free to contact us to discuss more. If you have any suggestion / feedback / doubt, you are most welcome.