Bill Baer /bɛːr/

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. In this post we’ll cover two examples, index-time and query-time merging.

Updates to the Conversations vertical in SharePoint, Office.com, and Microsoft Bing. Starting March 2022, there will be several upcoming changes to the ‘Conversations’ vertical in Microsoft Search. In March 2022, Conversations, as it exists, will be renamed to ‘Messages’ in Microsoft Bing (in April for Office.com) – providing results for Outlook and Teams conversations and later in July for SharePoint. Yammer conversations will be contained within the new Yammer vertical in Microsoft Bing, Office.

This week we shipped custom verticals and refiners on SharePoint content worldwide. Search verticals only show results of a certain type or from certain content. Examples are Files or News. By default, Microsoft Search shows the verticals All, People, Files, Sites, and News. You can add search verticals that are relevant to your organization that represent content indexed with one or more Microsoft Graph … keep reading. Vertical and filter customization on SharePoint content allows a Microsoft Search administrator to edit out-of-the-box search verticals, such as Files, Sites, News, etc.

I wrote this post primarily as a future point of reference for getting started with Kali Linux on Apple’s silicon (with Parallels). Kali Linux is an open-source, Debian-based Linux distribution geared towards various information security tasks, such as Penetration Testing, Security Research, Computer Forensics and Reverse Engineering. You can learn more about Kali at https://kali.org. Assuming you have Parallels 16+ you can either use the free systems installer with Parallels to install Kali or optionally, for more control over Kali’s configuration and a bare bones installation, you can install Kali from an image.

NOTE TO SELF Reset Atom’s personal access token Atom authenticationt to Github is through a personal access token. Personal access tokens (PATs) are an alternative to using passwords for authentication to GitHub when using the GitHub API or the command line. To reset your personal access token open the Command Pallet from Packages | Command Pallet | Toggle. Enter Github: Logout. Remove git stored credentials on the device Open Terminal and enter:

New APIs (preview) are available for Microsoft Search. These new APIs include Bookmarks and QnA. If you’re unfamiliar with Bookmarks and QnA, you can get caught up here: Answers in Microsoft Search Bookmark answers versus authoratative pages bookmark resource type A bookmark is an administrative answer in Microsoft Search results for common search queries in an organization. A bookmark has many properties which allow administrators to make common resources more accessible in their organization.

STUB Verticals A search vertical only shows results of a certain type or from certain content. Examples are Files or News. By default, Microsoft Search shows the verticals All, People, Files, Sites, and News. You can add search verticals that are relevant to your organization that represent content indexed with one or more Microsoft Graph connectors. Microsoft Graph connectors The ‘All’ vertical contains high value entities to include, but not limited to:

Bookmark Recommendations Bookmark Answers in Microsoft Search provide the flexibility for you to curate and promote curated resources on top of ranked results to help guide users to authoritative resources. Bookmark Answers are designed to help employee’s way find the organization and quickly identify the best and most relevant resource curated by you or your organization such as authoritative sites or documents to satisfy the searchers’ intent. Examples of Bookmark Answers can include sites, documents, or even files such as the Human Resources site, policy document, or more.

What are Answers in Microsoft Search? An Answer is a highly relevant and high confidence result that satisfies a user intent expressed as a query/question in search, presenting the most relevant information needed to get a job done and help users to faster task completion. An Answer is a way to address user intent. When searching, the user typically types in characters and keywords to express an intent. Recognizing the keywords that are triggers for specific intents is important, but it is even more important that the content that is shown in search satisfies the user intent.

Since the announcement of Microsoft Viva on February 4, 2021, I’ve come across a lot of questions and conversations surrounding Topics, specifically Topic Answers, and what a Topic Answer is… In the past I’ve posted quite a bit on Answers and their relationship to Microsoft Search, whether File Answers, Acronyms Answers, or something else - see https://wbaer.net/2020/10/making-the-most-of-answers-in-microsoft-search/. To put simply, a Topic Answer, is just one of the many forms of “Answers” generated by Microsoft Search.