BA Insight Brings Mobile Search to Office 365

BOSTON - Feb. 7, 2017 - PRLog -- BA Insight announces availability of Visual Refiners for O365 – out-of-the-box software that boosts productivity by providing a rich search user experience.  It uses reactive design and is mobile aware so that data exploration can be done effectively, even on a mobile device.

Visual Refiners now supports all Microsoft SharePoint configurations across O365, SharePoint 2013, and SharePoint 2016.  It uses Microsoft's SharePoint add-in architecture to provide easy deployment in O365 tenants without the need for additional infrastructure.

Visual Refiners for O365 includes:

·        Visual controls for selection, drilldown, refinement, and content exploration such as tree refiners, pie charts, histograms, sliders, site trees, and data pickers. Collapsing refiners preserve precious screen real estate, and the refinement panel becomes full screen on a mobile device for ease of use.

·        Search within, multi-select, and breadcrumb featuresallow users to navigate across large amounts of data quickly and with great precision, as well as explore search results without needing to start a new search.

·        Saved searches save, review, and rerun queries, including complex queries with multiple refinements applied, along with immediate access to query history. Saved results exports a result set into Excel for sharing, auditing, and further analysis.

These capabilities dramatically improve the user experience in the Search Center and are even more important for effective searching on mobile devices with limited screen real estate.

"Organizations often want to offer a search experience as strong as consumer sites such as Amazon or Expedia, but their efforts fall short.  It's much harder than it looks, and the out-of-the-box SharePoint controls are insufficient," said Eric Overfield, a leading expert on SharePoint Branding, co-author of Pro SharePoint 2013 Branding and Responsive Web Development, and President of PixelMill.  "BA Insight's Visual Refiners product is a great way to accelerate successful search UX in SharePoint.  It lets you focus on the data quality and branding rather than getting mired in custom code."

Visual Refiners can also be used in combination with other BA Insight products.  For example, BA Insight's AutoClassifier can create consistent metadata on content so that exploration through Visual Refiners covers all content with full control.  Visual Refiners can also be used in conjunction with BA Insight's Smart Previews product, which was recently updated to be mobile-friendly and provides a richer search user experience with previews of content from outside of SharePoint.

"Great search experiences are hard to achieve – doubly so on mobile. We're thrilled to offer a new product to eliminate the bulk of the time, effort, and risk in providing remarkable search UIs in Office 365," said Jeff Fried, CTO of BA Insight. "This has been well-received by our customers, as many of them are accelerating their adoption of O365 and mobile with the availability of cloud hybrid search and the SharePoint mobile app.  We've built Visual Refiners for O365 to fit cleanly into the current and future Microsoft architecture and to leverage all the out-of-the-box capabilities from Microsoft.  This means our customers can focus on their business rather than developing customizations or worrying about adapting to changes in O365."

Visual Refiners for Office 365 is available immediately.  For more information, visit http://bainsight.com/visual-refiners