Search content in Microsoft Teams/Microsoft Planner

Question

Microsoft seems to position the relatively new products "Microsoft Teams" and "Microsoft Planner" (both part of Office 365) as competitors of what SharePoint and SharePoint Online used to provide in the past.

• Communication
• Tasks
• Document sharing

Microsoft Teams provides communication and file sharing. Microsoft Planner makes task managment pretty easy.

Is it possible to add a content source to our SharePoint hybrid search (SharePoint 2016 on premise connected with our SharePoint Online) to find communication and documents in Microsoft Teams within the same tenant? To keep overview of tasks I would appreciate if there was a way to get tasks in Microsoft Planner crawled by the SharePoint Search Service as well.

Answer 1

Interesting idea, though I think I would wait for Microsoft to add "Enterprise Search" capability to Teams. (Or to look at it another way, add Teams to the content that is crawled along with everything else.) You will probably see the content show up in Microsoft Graph, in fact you can already get access to your Teams and Groups through the graph, so if it's not there already, it will be soon. (I just haven't looked). Also remember that the associated libraries are in a site hosted by SPO, so like groups, some of the content from the Team is actually in SPO. Though this does not apply to the threaded conversations.

OK, so your question was..."Can you..." you certainly could "try", you could try to provide your on-prem SSA a start address of the Team and then try to provide the alternate credentials of a cloud account that has access to the Team through a crawl rule. The problem a Team is not a traditional web site, so how and what gets crawled would be "interesting" to watch. Ultimately, I don't think the results would be very good.