Microsoft is introducing a new Acronyms search feature in Microsoft Search for enterprises that help employees look up an acronym specific to their organization. The company says that 2-3% of searches made within an organization are related to acronyms. The firm has detailed the procedure for admins to add and publish “custom definitions for acronyms” that are local to an organization and refer to people, products, groups, operations, or services.
The Acronym search function can intelligently pick words and definitions from the company’s internal sites, documents, and even SharePoint sites, Yammer and Teams. The firm states that the “privacy of mined data is maintained”, and that users will only be served data from places that they have access to.
The feature can also provide multiple definitions based on the context and the custom definitions that are created for the acronym by the organization’s administrators. The Redmond giant notes that these multiple definitions help those users that may not be aware of certain acronyms that mean more than one thing.
For searches that do not have any known or pre-defined acronyms, or results from documents for that user, Microsoft Search then provides proper Bing Search results to help users resolve their queries. The firm adds that “When a work-search result has a high certainty of being a good match, the result is shown”.
The acronyms specific to an organization can be searched only by employees of that organization. As expected, these internal results, Microsoft notes, will not be available for anybody searching for the acronym outside the organization. Only those signed into a Microsoft Search-enabled account as an authenticated user can view these results.
Admins can head to the Microsoft Search admin center and sign in with their admin account to manage the acronyms in the “Acronym” section. One must note that one must be a Global Admin, Search Admin, or Search Editor to access the Microsoft Search admin center. You can head over to the detailed documentation here for step-by-step instruction. There also is a bulk import/export option that currently supports the import of 3000 acronyms at one time.