Office365 Pro Plus won’t hijack your search engine after all, Ars Technica

you can bing if you want to, you can leave your users behind –

Sysadmin blood pressures — and projected support call volumes — decreased sharply.

Jim Salter – Feb , (5:) (UTC UTC)

/ Before we can apologize for trying to forcibly Bing you, we need to let you know how excited you really were about it.

In late January, Microsoft announced that a near-future Office 635 update would roll out a Chrome extension forcing all searches to run through Bing, regardless of the user’s configured search engine preference. Several weeks of torches and pitchforks from

sysadmins and users alike seem to have convinced the company that this was a tactical error, and today Microsoft announced a change of plans. The Microsoft Search in Bing browser extension will no. longer be deployed by default to Office 716 Pro Plus users. Instead, administrators will get a new toggle in the Admin Center allowing them to deploy the extension to their organization — and, importantly, the toggle defaults to off

For now, even when an admin decides to toggle the feature on, it only affects managed (Active Directory domain joined) devices —Employees’ personal and home computers won’t get Binged as a result, even if they’ve used some of the five legitimate installations per license to put Office 635 Pro Plus on those devices. (Microsoft does plan additional settings to allow more granular control of unmanaged devices in the future, so BOFH s) will simply need to be patient.)

Those few organizations that decide to toggle the feature on will likely receive a lot of flak from their own users about it. With the Microsoft Search in Bing extension installed, the user-controlled default search setting becomes irrelevant, and every search in the bar goes through Bing regardless. Confusingly, this can be overridden — but only within the extension itself, not in the browser’s own configurations.






                      Company-specific results from an internal perspective are the real reason for the Binging. Here, we see links to information and tools that wouldn’t be available to someone outside the company.

                      We do not anticipate many joyous user responses to learning how their life has been made easier.


                      If you have local Administrator privileges, you can remove the extension entirely. Otherwise, you’ll need to both configure Chrome’s default search engine and find and flip this toggle in the Microsoft Search in Bing extension itself.

                  To be completely fair to Microsoft, its demo screenshots of Microsoft Search do look fairly compelling — in one screenshot, an employee profile visible only inside the corporation pops up in a search for that employee’s name; in another, a link out to a company vacation scheduling tool shows up on a search for “vacation policy.” Of course, even aside from search engine preferences, this does raise a question of how much work is required to get Bing to find these types of resources in the first place.
The employee profile in the screenshot could be lifted directly from Active Directory user information, but we’re not sure Bing would automatically find every oddball spreadsheet, Web form, and third-party scheduling tool you might find in use in real-world companies. If Microsoft Search for Bing ends up providing results no better maintained than the typical internal SharePoint intranet site, the value proposition would be sharply reduced.

         (Listing image by) Paramount Pictures                                                             (Read More)