[Editor’s note: This content was written to highlight a particular event or moment in time. Although that moment has passed, we’re republishing it here so you can see what our thinking and experience was like at the time.]

Within Microsoft, there are some entrenched employee habits that make the company what it is, like living in email, dressing casually, and project managing a solution for every problem.

Also high on that list?

Saving files locally, a habit that has stuck with a company that grew up around Windows and its system of using folders to store and organize files.

Now, the company wants its employees to store everything in the cloud on OneDrive for Business, where it’ll be more secure and easy to access, plus several other reasons that will be shared below.

But first, about changing the entrenched habit of clicking File, Save As, and then navigating to your favorite folder on drive C.

“We thought about asking our employees to change their behavior, but then we asked ourselves, ‘Why? This is how our employees like to work,’” says Anne Marie Suchanek, a program manager on the team that manages OneDrive for Business internally in Microsoft Digital.

Instead, Microsoft Digital worked with the Microsoft OneDrive Sync team to deploy a feature called Known Folder Move (also available to external customers) that makes it possible for employees to save documents, and pictures to their file folder system the same way they always have. The only difference when they save their content via that familiar local drive file path is that their content also will automatically save to OneDrive for Business.

“Why change a good thing?” asks Suchanek, who is currently leading a rollout of the file-saving experience within Microsoft in North America. “We decided to go to them with a solution that will allow them to keep doing things the way they like to do them.”

Known Folder Move very specifically mimics the exact motions that employees (and all Windows users) have used for decades to save files—the only difference is now Microsoft and its employees enjoy the security and convenience of having their content automatically saved in the cloud.

Suchanek’s Microsoft Digital team is currently rolling out the feature via an email announcement that encourages employees to adopt early. After the opt-in phase finishes, the team will—after letting them know that it’s coming—silently deploy the system to everyone in North America (except those employees whose complex folder workflows would be disrupted by such a move). When North America is finished, the plan is to expand to the rest of the world.

It’s all part of the company’s journey to the cloud.

“We want to be a cloud-first company,” Suchanek says. “That means doing everything we can to embrace all the different features of the cloud, and part of that is getting our corporate data on the cloud.”

Getting employees on board

Saving to the cloud is something most employees are already doing, given that OneDrive for Business has been an option for employees for quite a while, says Eva Etchells, a program manager on Microsoft Digital’s End User Readiness and Communications team. She also said many of them are accustomed to backing up their personal data on the version of OneDrive that supports their personal Microsoft email accounts.

“Mostly I’m just raising awareness about it so that they’re not surprised when it pops up as an alert,” says Etchells, who has the role of answering employee questions about deployments of new features like this. “I let them know it’s not malware.”

The main challenge is for developers who use intricate systems of folders to store their code on their individual PCs—a system that needs to stay intact to work correctly.

“We’re allowing those employees to opt out,” Suchanek says. “The product group is working on improvements that will improve the experience for engineers who migrate their PC folders to the cloud.”

Etchells says she’s mainly talking to employees about the benefits of moving their files to the cloud, which include being able to access files from any approved device; having everything backed up if something happens to your PC; being able to collaborate and share any file, even those on your desktop or in your documents folder; and better security.

That’s not the biggest benefit, however.

“The thing that wins them over is finding out that they’re going to get five terabytes of storage space,” says Etchells, who communicates openly with employees on Yammer. “Why would I put anything on my dev box if I’m going to have that much space? There is literally no reason to not do this.”

Suchanek says moving to the cloud brings a whole set of benefits regarding coauthoring.

“We want people to work in the cloud and to collaborate in the cloud,” she says. “When they do, this problem of creating many versions of the same document and then trying to merge them all together goes away. Once a document is saved into OneDrive, everyone is automatically working out of the same version.”

Making OneDrive better

The OneDrive product team rolled out the Known Folder Move feature 18 months ago to help deliver a modern desktop experience and drive engagement with OneDrive by allowing users to sync where they are accustomed to saving their files, says Gaia Carini, a principal PM manager on the OneDrive and SharePoint Team.

“We think of deploying this feature as a critical step toward having a modern desktop experience,” Carini says. “We are recommending that all of our customers take the necessary steps to make sure their important files are in OneDrive.”

She says Microsoft is no exception, and that she’s happy to see the company using Known Folder Move.

“We are excited to partner with Microsoft Digital to leverage some of those same benefits within Microsoft,” Carini says.

She says getting feedback and adoption from Microsoft employees helps the product group improve features before they are rolled out to customers—something that’s very useful to the product and the company at large.

For example, many customers have been waiting on the ability to deploy the Known Folder Move for users with local OneNote notebooks saved in their documents folder.

“If you have one of those notebooks, you can’t use Known Folder Move to move it to the cloud,” she says. “Fixing that has been a major request by some of our external customers. Microsoft Digital has been helping us validate our solution within the Microsoft deployment rings, which has been a big help.”

• Learn more about using the Known Folder Move feature at your company.

The post OneDrive for Business feature shifts how employees save files within 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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