Finding what you need at work just got easier with Bing for business

Today, at the Microsoft Ignite Conference in Orlando, we announced Bing for business – a new intelligent search experience for Office 365 and Microsoft 365, which uses AI and the Microsoft Graph to deliver more relevant search results based on your organizational context. This new experience from Bing for your enterprise, school, or organization helps users save time by intelligently and securely retrieving information from enterprise resources such as company data, people, documents, sites and locations as well as public web results, displaying them in a single experience. Bing for business can be used with a browser on any device, transforming the way employees search for information at work, ultimately making them more productive.

Bing for business is available for private preview starting today and will be available as part of existing subscriptions to Office 365 Enterprise E1, E3, E5, F1, Business Essentials, Business Premium, and Education E5 subscriptions. If you are interested in receiving an invitation to participate in the private preview, visit http://aka.ms/b4bprivatepreview.

Intelligent search to help increase productivity and save time

In our work and personal lives, we spend lot of time in the browser searching for information. Analyzing web search traffic at Microsoft, we realized that as our employees searched the web, a significant amount of search traffic was for internal business-related content. We knew that this wasn’t just the case for Microsoft, but for many organizations, and it prompted the question – If Bing can tell me how high Mt. Rainier is, why can’t it quickly find what a colleague is working on or what are the employee benefits? Bing for business started with these pain points in mind. As we talked with more customers about their challenges in this space, we realized there was an opportunity to create something truly compelling. Our goal was twofold. For end users, we wanted to create an offering that can increase productivity by getting them the relevant and 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. 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.

For example, let’s say you have an upcoming meeting about a project with a new colleague. Through Bing for business, you can quickly look up their contact information, find out who they report to, see the Office 365 groups they are a part of and much more. Additionally, you will also have web search which may highlight a publicly available blog/portfolio, or other relevant content. This would normally take six or more different searches across multiple locations. Bing for business pulls this data from across the Microsoft Graph and the web to create an experience where you get all this information in one place, so you save time searching.

Bing for business also help you quickly find internal company resources. When you’re trying to find the time card site, trying to figure out vacation policy, or simply trying to find out how much vacation you have left, Bing for business can bring you links to these resources from just searching for “time off.” These bookmarks can be manually curated by the IT Admin or created based on frequency of search terms. Using bookmarks saves you time by helping you get to the right company resources simply by searching for the relevant term all from within Bing.

Bing for businesses key features include:

• Enterprise Bookmarks – Bookmarks provide the fastest way for you to find sites, tools, and other information within the enterprise. Bookmarks can range from timely topics with a short life span like a company event to more permanent bookmarks, such as linking to the internal time and reporting tool.
• People Search – With Bing for business, people search is a quick way to help you search and find a person and understand their role within the company, who they work for, see what they are working on, find out where they are located and get directions through integrated building and office floor maps.
• Organizational Chart – Quick access to the organizational chart to understand a person’s place within the company and further browse their peers, management, and direct reports. 
• Building and Floor Plans – Buildings and floor plans help you quickly find your way or locate where a colleague is sitting or to learn your way around a new building.
• Document Search – Allows you to search and find contextual and relevant documents saved on SharePoint and other sources within the Microsoft Graph.
• Office 365 Groups – You will be able to explore the Groups a person belongs to as part of people search and browse their contents. Additionally, they will be able to search for groups by their name.
• Bing for business Industry News – Bing works with your company to understand your job and tasks. Over time, Bing learns which business news matters to you – such as news about your company, competitors, and industry.  This feature is a personalized newsfeed on Bing.com, helping you make timely, informed decisions.
• Management and Analytics – IT admins can quickly configure, create bookmarks, and define the search triggers, words or phrases. IT admins will also have a better understanding on how people within the organization are searching the web.

Intelligent search leveraging AI to save you time

Bing for business is built on the Microsoft Graph and uses AI to provide contextual, boundless, and relevant results for your Bing search. These results help employees save time increase productivity.

For example, you have a question on how to set up your work VPN, or how to reset your Bitlocker password. Today, getting these questions answered could include calling tech support and potentially incurring costs associated with the call, searching the public web or the corporate intranet, and browsing knowledge base articles. Bing for business uses Machine Reading Comprehension and Deep Learning to understand the intent of the question across all documents in your enterprise. And since it knows who you are based on your authentication session, it can synthesize the best answer for your specific query across all the documents you can access – from the public internet to your private intranet.

Enterprise grade protection, manageability, and analytics

Bing for business offers enhanced protection for your Bing web searches and treats your enterprise data in a compliant way. Searching with Bing for business requires Azure Active Directory authentication to access results, and the results that are returned are ones the authenticated user has access to, coming directly from the trusted cloud. Search queries are anonymized, aggregated across all companies and separated from public Bing search traffic. Additionally, these queries are not used for displaying targeted ad based on your work or company identity, and company-specific queries are not viewable by advertisers. This provides a level of protection unavailable anywhere else in the industry.

In addition to enhanced protections, Bing for business is easy to manage and deploy. Available as part of Office 365, Bing for business can be easily deployed by adding Bing to your tenant from the Office 365 admin panel. Once added, a quick configuration to set the logo, name, and color is all that is required to set up Bing for business. From there, users that have been enabled for Bing for business can access it at www.bing.com.

Private Preview

Today, Bing for business is in private preview as we move towards general availability next year. During this period, we are interested in partnering with a diverse group of customers to try out the feature, and help us shape future versions. If you would like to request an invitation to participate in the private preview, please visit http://aka.ms/b4bprivatepreview. We look forward to receiving your feedback as we continue to add features and capabilities to Bing for business.

– Deen King-Smith
Sr. Product Marketing Manager | Search, Edge, and AI

Source: Bing Blog Feed