Birds of Eurasia Best Pictures

There is a new site – Birds of Eurasia Best Pictures – with a lot of good pictures of birds from all of the Eurasian continent. It does not seem that pictures are professional, sooner shots are made by amature birdwatchers, but some pictures are really nice.

Pictures are updated around weekly. Here is an example:

Cinereous Vulture (Aegypius monachus)

Shoot in Mongolia by Oleg Belyalov

Another great picture:

Collared Pratincole
by Philippe Campeau,
Kyrgyzstan

Collared Pratincole by Philippe Campeau, Kyrgyzstan

SharePoint Governance

Governance in IT is establishing rules, policies, tools and practices that helps you manage and protect your enterprise resources. SharePoint governance (or wider – Collaboration governance) covers

  • resources ownership and lifecycle
  • users’ access to resources
  • compliance with your business standards
  • security of your data

References

Restricted SharePoint Search

Restricted SharePoint Search is a new (2024) Microsoft 365 feature that should help make search results more relevant, especially in large Microsoft 365 environments, especially when you are implementing Copilot.

When you have a really big number of sites – it is very difficult to make them all have correct (minimal) permissions provided. So the typical situation (unfortunately) we have a lot of overshared sites. There are also a lot of ownerless sites where permissions are not managed. We know that search is security-trimmed, i.e. a user can get search results from content he/she already has access to. When it comes to regular search experience – a user can see with his own eyes the source of the content he/she gets results from – so user can understand that results are coming from sites user should not have access to (overshared sites).

When it comes to AI-based search (Copilot) – user is getting answers, but he/she do not always know the source of that data. But we want to ensure it is trained on a proper set of data and results users get are curated to their needs. So for Copilot we really need to exclude from search scope such sites we are not sure content is valid and properly secured. We do not want users get garbage upon requests.

This is where Restricted SharePoint Search feature should help, as with this feature your can restrict organization-wide search (and Copilot) to a curated list of SharePoint sites – “allowed sites” – sites that passed attestation and where permissions are checked and data governance policies are applied.

Restricted SharePoint Search feature is free – i.e. it is included in standard Microsoft 365 license. Do not be confused with site access restriction policy – feature that require SharePoint Premium license and allows to restrict access to some SharePoint sites with specific groups only.

References

New Microsoft Graph Connector service plan

Microsoft Graph connectors allow your organization to index third-party data into Microsoft Graph. Microsoft Graph connectors enable Microsoft 365 Copilot better as it has more information relevant to your organization to answer prompts.

According to Microsoft, Microsoft 365 will soon include a new service plan, Graph Connectors Search with Index, offering a 50 million item index limit per tenant at no cost. Rollout starts September 2024.

Microsoft Search and Intelligence - Data Sources. 
You can build and customize connections managed by your organization. These can index data from apps such as Salesforce, Oracle SQL and Azure DevOps. Connections listed as Search under Connected experiences count toward your search connection quota utilization.

Previously, to index third-party data into Microsoft Graph through Microsoft Graph connectors, you either needed to have a built-in entitlement through specific licenses (e.g., 500 items of index quota per Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 license) or purchase add-on quota. With this change, the index quota per license entitlement is removed, as is add-on cost for additional quota. You now receive an entitlement of 50 million items for each tenant.

Each entity (or record) from the source data system that you add to Microsoft Graph can be considered an item which then shows up as a unique citation in Copilot’s responses, as a unique search result in Microsoft Search, etc. Depending on the type of data source, 1 item is –

  • 1 document (word, excel, ppt, pdf, etc.) in file share
  • 1 wiki page in Confluence
  • 1 webpage in a website
  • 1 ticket/issue in Jira

Total quota utilized is calculated in terms of total items stored in the index. Updates/changes to an item are not counted in any manner. There are no cost implications of updating an item multiple times. It still counts as 1 item only.

Applicable to subscriptions: Office 365 E1, Office 365 E3, Office 365 E5, Microsoft 365 E3, Microsoft 365 E5, Microsoft 365 F1, Microsoft 365 F3, Office 365 F3, Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Microsoft 365 Business Standard, Microsoft 365 Business Premium, Office 365 G1, Office 365 G3, Office 365 G5, Microsoft 365 G3, Microsoft 365 G5, Office 365 A3, Office 365 A5, Microsoft 365 A3, Microsoft 365 A5