Microsoft began deploying the new Microsoft Edge browser to its 151,000 employees this week, a critical step in the company’s worldwide rollout of the Chromium-based browser.

“Microsoft’s internal use of the new Edge has been pivotal for us,” says Steve Rugh, a principal program manager lead in the Microsoft Edge product group. He thanked the 100,000 employees who used pre-release versions of the browser, saying, “Their feedback helped us shape the product.”

Rugh called out his team’s direct partnership with Microsoft Digital. The IT engineering organization is currently deploying the new browser across the company, and the team that deployed the beta to several teams over the past year for scenario validation and testing.

“Microsoft gives us an excellent way to test how enterprise-ready we are,” he says.

“Microsoft gives us an excellent way to test how enterprise-ready we are,” he says. “Leveraging Microsoft early and often has helped us find and fix gaps—and it doesn’t hurt that, because they are down the hallway or in the building across the street, they are very easy to talk to and partner with.”

Herman Forrest, a senior program manager in Microsoft Digital, says that employees have been eager to use the new Microsoft Edge, both in preview channels and its final form.

“When you have a great product—when you a have clear use case, great examples, proof points on why it’s better than the legacy version of Microsoft Edge—then you don’t have to convince people to use it,” says Forrest, who is project-managing Microsoft’s internal deployment of the new Microsoft Edge. “People have been volunteering to try the new Edge on their own—that’s how we got more than 100,000 employees to try the most recent version of the beta.”

Just like it did with the beta, Microsoft Digital will deploy Microsoft Edge in waves, starting with an inner ring of early adopters who, through telemetry, and qualitive and quantitative research, ensure that everything is working correctly.

“We’ll do a phased deployment, scaling up to 15,000 employees,” Forrest says. At that point, the team also will make sure that major company portals like Human Resources, the company’s internal home page, and other key internal sites are working as expected. “We want to make sure everything is compatible and that all features are working correctly.”

Once confirmed, the browser will be deployed to the rest of the company in waves of 20,000 to 40,000 employees. That work will likely stretch into April.

“Doing this in a phased manner allows our communications team to send out targeted communications,” says Daniel Manalo, the Microsoft Digital senior service engineer in charge of the technical deployment of Microsoft Edge. “That way we minimize surprising people when the installation starts.”

Employees who have put Microsoft Edge through its paces have done so because they want to help and because they want to try it out, says John Philpott, a Microsoft Digital senior service engineer working on the internal deployment.

“We want people to choose Edge because they like the experience,” he says.

Philpott’s team will track how employees react and will address any issues or concerns they have. “So far everything has been really positive,” he says.

Employees who were on the beta consistently scored Microsoft Edge in the 150 to 160 Net User Satisfaction (NSAT) range out of a maximum of 200, and Philpott expects similar results when it’s broadly deployed. “That’s a huge improvement over the 70 to 80 that the old Edge used to fight for,” he says.

[Learn more about how Microsoft has made the search experience it offers employees more intelligent and personalized. Check out how Microsoft has embraced Windows as a service internally.]

Exploring the new Microsoft Edge

Philpott is among the early users who are enjoying the new browser’s features and capabilities.

“The thing I like the most is that they’ve nailed proper syncing,” Philpott says. “Not only do my favorites, passwords, and things like that travel with me from device to device, but they also now allow me to switch from a work profile to a personal profile. I used to have to open a different browser every time I wanted to look at my personal sites—now I don’t have to have multiple browsers.”

It also includes Internet Explorer mode (IE mode), a feature designed for organizations that have older websites and line-of-business applications that run only on Internet Explorer 11.

“Now, when you open one of those applications, the link will open in IE mode right in Edge,” Philpott says of a mode that needs to be set up by IT admins during deployment. “Internet Explorer won’t open on its own anymore. Edge will be your home for the web no matter what you use it for.”

Forrest says that IE mode is designed to simplify the experience of moving back and forth between legacy sites and the current experience.

“One of my favorite features in the new Microsoft Edge is how well IE mode combines this modern rendering engine and compatibility with legacy Internet Explorer sites,” he says.

Employees have also enjoyed improvements to Microsoft Search in Bing.

“You can search both the intranet and the internet at the same time,” Forrest says. “Edge will serve you your internal and external results in one view. That’s a powerful, powerful experience.”

Forrest also spotlighted new privacy-enhancing features in the new Microsoft Edge, including Tracking prevention options and a new InPrivate search with Microsoft Bing when browsing in InPrivate.

“The fact that you’re an employee doesn’t mean we can get data on you,” he says. “Just like our customers, Edge protects your privacy.”

Tools for deploying Microsoft Edge

Rugh says there’s a lot to like in the new browser for the IT admins who plan to deploy it.

The company’s decision to build on the Chromium open-source engine means that far more websites will now work on Microsoft Edge, he says.

“This is where users are and this is where web developers are,” Rugh says. “Rather than find yet another way to fracture the web with yet another browser, we decided to build on and improve upon the Chromium open-source project that most people and developers are using.”

Rugh says helping to get everyone on one browser platform is good for everyone, including Microsoft.

“Now it’s easier to use our browser,” he says. “The new Microsoft Edge is still a front door to Microsoft and now it will be easier for more people to walk through that door.”

With Microsoft Edge, the company has layered many features and protections on top of that open-source platform, creating a browser with the best of all worlds.

“It has best-in-class compatibility with extensions and web sites,” Rugh says. “It has great support for the latest rendering capabilities and modern web applications, and it has powerful developer tools that work across all supported platforms.”

IT admins can use features that Microsoft built into Microsoft Edge on top of the Chromium open-source platform, including Application Guard and SmartScreen for enhancing browser security. Application Guard opens Microsoft Edge in a separate container to protect intruders from trying to access the device or operating system, and SmartScreen helps to protect against malware and phishing.

And unlike with the legacy version of Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer, updates to the new browser can be deployed when the admin wants. They no longer have to wait on the Windows Update cadence.

“We have a new version of the browser ship roughly every six weeks and we make security updates as needed,” Rugh says. “Now we can move as fast as needed to make sure we keep Edge secure and working.”

The fact that reboots are not needed when a new version gets rolled out got a thumbs-up from employees, Microsoft Digital’s Philpott says.

“The updates happened so seamlessly in the background during the beta that often times the only way employees knew that a new version had been loaded onto their machine was because a ‘what’s new’ tile would pop up in their browser,” he says.

Those kinds of improvements are changing the way Microsoft employees feel about the company’s Microsoft Edge.

“I really like the new browser,” Philpott says. “I use it on my home machine, which I think says a lot. The enterprise customer is important, but what people use at school and at home ends up being what they use at work.”

Interested in the new Microsoft Edge for your organization? Download offline installers and pilot it today.

• Read this follow up story on the completion of Microsoft’s internal roll out of the new Microsoft Edge browser. 
• Learn more about how Microsoft has made the search experience it offers employees more intelligent and personalized.
• Check out how Microsoft has embraced Windows as a service internally.

The post Rolling out Microsoft Edge browser across Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Search is part of our everyday life. It’s useful—we all know that—but how can you quantify that impact?

That was the challenge faced by Dodd Willingham, principal program manager and internal search administrator in Microsoft Digital. “There’s an obvious value, we can see that by the existence of Bing,” Willingham says. “But how do you put it in numbers?”

Lots of searches happen in a company, but when asked to demonstrate the business impact as part of justifying more investment, Willingham had an epiphany. He could use telemetry to make the argument for him.

Click the image to learn how Microsoft is using Microsoft Search internally to dramatically improve the finding experience for company employees.

Microsoft Search is unifying search for Microsoft 365 customers across Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft 365 apps on Windows, Microsoft OneDrive for Business, Microsoft SharePoint, and Microsoft Bing. More specifically, the Microsoft Search team strives to bring complete, company-wide results to each individual, no matter where they’re searching from. No longer should they need to search in separate products to ensure that they search all possible content.

Internally at Microsoft, this shift is proving to be very powerful.

“Employees no longer need to change platforms to get the results they’re looking for,” Willingham says. “They do a single search and get all the results they need.”

Within the company, Microsoft Digital manages the internal deployment of search across the company. “The purpose of active search administration is to deliver the most complete search results, with good relevancy and good quality,” Willingham says. “These improvements to search are helping us do that.”

One crucial way that Willingham and his team help deliver better search results is through corporate bookmarks that allow internal teams like Corporate Communications and Human Resources to select the top results employees get when they search specific sets of keywords.

These bookmarks aren’t the kind used to save your favorite sites—they’re curated results that search administrators can use to point people to content located someplace that can’t be indexed. They highlight authoritative sources of content, and ensure popular content is accessible.

Bookmarks boost employee productivity because they get employees the right results very quickly.

Dodd Willingham, principal program manager and internal search administrator in Microsoft Digital

And they’re fast.

“Bookmarks boost employee productivity because they get employees the right results very quickly,” Willingham says.

The business value of search

Including telemetry in the overall improvements to internal corporate searching—a feature built into Microsoft Enterprise SharePoint—allowed Willingham and his team to measure how much time employees spend on a search.

And what story is the data telling?

“We found that bookmarks net a direct benefit of 6,250 hours a month and 17,160 hours in indirect benefits,” Willingham says. “Combined, 23,410 hours of benefits are being realized each month.”

How did Willingham come to these numbers?

“Forty-five percent of all searches click on a bookmark,” Willingham says. That percentage is across the 1.6 million monthly searches that take place internally at Microsoft within Microsoft Bing and Microsoft SharePoint Enterprise Search.

Scaled to an enterprise level, the business value of bookmarks quickly became apparent.

“Conservatively, our basic measurement of search success was yielding results of 60 seconds per search using a bookmark versus an average of 115 seconds across all searches,” Willingham says. “That’s one whole minute of productivity re-captured for every bookmark-backed search.”

Multiplied across Microsoft’s population and search usage, that one minute of search time netted 6,250 hours a month in productivity. But it’s not just time gained from quick search results, it’s also about getting the right answers.

There’s a measurement based on telemetry of whether a search succeeded or failed to find useful content. Using that metric, Willingham found that a person who uses a bookmark appears to be successful 98 percent of the time. By contrast, searches without a bookmark average 72 percent for the same calculation.

“The absolute calculation [of search success] is kind of meaningless; what’s important is that it moved by a significant margin,” Willingham says. “It suggests that with bookmarks, more people find the content they need faster.”

In direct benefits, you’re gaining 6,000 hours at the cost of 300. When you include indirect, you can triple that. The return on investment is 2,000 percent, and that’s using conservative estimates.

Dodd Willingham, principal program manager and internal search administrator in Microsoft Digital

Faster is a direct productivity gain. Getting the right content to the right person at the right time is an indirect benefit. But the biggest insight is that delivering these benefits only requires investing less than 300 hours per month, spread across several staff.

“In direct benefits, you’re gaining 6,000 hours at the cost of 300. When you include indirect, you can triple that,” Willingham says. “The return on investment is 2,000 percent, and that’s using conservative estimates.”

How Microsoft uses bookmarks

With new practices in hand and telemetry to chart impact, Willingham and his team set out to optimize using bookmarks in search.

“Over the course of three years, we took the volume of bookmarks from around 1,100 to a peak of 1,800,” he says. “We’re currently sitting at around 1,200.”

Bookmarks were already being used before Microsoft Search was rolled out.

“We didn’t do anything revolutionary, we just opened up the guidelines so that more bookmarks could be added when appropriate,” Willingham says. “We then tuned them based on actual usage so that only those being used were kept.”

The technology for bookmarks had previously been part of Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft OneDrive, made visible in the employee portal for Microsoft SharePoint Enterprise, MSW. Bookmarks had a set of configuration rules and standards for what could and couldn’t be a bookmark, but that’s it.

Librarians from the Microsoft Library Services team create and manage the company’s search bookmarks.

“It’s a multifaceted role,” says Beck Keller, also a member of the Microsoft Digital Enterprise Search team. “My responsibilities as a librarian at the Microsoft Library are far broader—bookmarks are just a small part of my job. This doesn’t take up my entire work week.”

What does she do for search administration?

Every month, Keller pulls search query metrics and analyzes them for areas of interest that currently lack a bookmark or good naturalized results. From this analysis, Keller can update the enterprise bookmarks across Microsoft.

“Sometimes this means removing or changing bookmarks that don’t currently meet our standards,” Keller says. “I also review proposed bookmarks and offer guidance to Microsoft teams looking to create bookmarks for their own sites, outside of Enterprise Search.”

This is the administrative work Willingham is talking about—bookmarks can be added, removed, or updated with ease. But the impact can be bigger than recapturing lost productivity.

“A year ago, there were no searches for COVID-19,” Willingham says. “We now get hundreds and thousands of searches a month. We went from zero to around 200 [between October and February]. There was no way to surface relevant results about COVID-19 because there were so few of them.”

But this was the trait the administrative search team was looking for—how to get better and proactive insights on Microsoft Search. Informed by current events, the team sought to anticipate which results users would be looking for.

“We asked if there should be a bookmark for the right COVID-19 link,” Keller says.

Willingham and Keller reached out to Corporate Communications about where to direct Microsoft users searching for information on COVID-19. That team was putting together a landing page for employees dedicated to content on the topic, including a FAQ. The bookmark was quickly built and deployed.

This was February 2020.

“The next month, the volume of searches for COVID-19 went up 40-fold,” Willingham says. “Maybe users would have found the info on their own, but as search volume was growing, 8,000 times a month they would nearly always find what they were looking for quickly, thanks to the bookmark.”

That’s the main goal of a search administrator.

Bright future for bookmarks

So, what’s next for Microsoft Search and bookmarks?

“More telemetry,” Willingham says. “The custom telemetry that we created is something any customer can do. It’s a capability within SharePoint.”

Having even more metrics will also help to further quantify Willingham’s findings.

“We erred on the low side for our productivity numbers, but it shows what’s possible for a medium or large company.”

Both Willingham and Keller are excited to see others adopt bookmarks as a way of improving Microsoft Search.

“Bookmarks are easy to put in,” Keller says. “The owner of the content tells us what the URL is, and some basic info such as a preliminary title and description. We figure out the appropriate keywords, update the basic info where needed, and then say ‘Go.’”

It all adds up to a better experience for employees when they need to go looking for something.

“The same tools we use to optimize bookmarks are available to everyone,” Willingham says. “That’s why they’re so useful for productivity. When combined with telemetry, you can really gain some unexpected insights into the productivity of your organization.”

• Read this guide on how to create and manage bookmarks at your company.
• Getting to ‘search completeness’ internally at Microsoft.

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