Office365 Pro Plus won’t hijack your search engine after all
Enlarge / Stop trying to make Bing happen, Microsoft. It's never going to happen. (credit: Paramount Pictures)
In late January, Microsoft announced that a near-future Office 365 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-although they couldn't resist prefacing it by announcing how exciting the original, unpopular change really was.
On January 22, 2020 we announced in advance that the Microsoft Search in Bing browser extension would be made available through Office 365 ProPlus on Windows devices starting at the end of February. Since then, we've heard from many customers who are excited about the value Microsoft Search provides through Bing and the simplicity of deploying that value through Office 365 ProPlus. With Microsoft Search integrated, Bing becomes a single search engine for users to find what they need - both from inside their organization and the public web.
But we've also heard concerns about the way we were planning to roll this value out.
The Microsoft Search in Bing browser extension will no longer be deployed by default to Office 365 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 365 Pro Plus on those devices. (Microsoft does plan additional settings to allow more granular control of unmanaged devices in the future, so BOFHs will simply need to be patient.)
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