Searching external webpages in the Dataverse Portal Search

[Anonymous]

Hi,

with the new Dataverse Search coming and (eventually) being the default search for Portals.

We have our product documentation hosted on "docs.website.com".

Is there any way how we can make the Dataverse search not only in the Knowledge Base Articles, but also our product documentation?

Our Goal: When the user searches in our Portal, it will show results from the Knowledge Base and also from our product documentation. 

When the user clicks a link from the Documentation, the Documentation opens in a new tab.

Can we do this in any way?

If it is NOT possible, what could be workarounds?

- Can we use any Azure service for this?

- The Customer Service Hub also has "Search Providers" that can be added - maybe could this be a workaround? No idea what this does tbh.

We thought of maybe creating an own Table "Documentation and Documentation Article" and make those entities available in the search. But we would then need a crawler/script which extracts the content of our very own product documentation to have it automatically updated... 

Thanks

[OliverRodrigues]

The Dataverse search would be very much focused on your data available in dataverse, so there is no configuration in the system that would allow you to do that. Workarounds would be:

• Complete custom search (using API or Fetch)
• Creating a simple KB record in Dataverse with the link for your docs website, not sure how this would work really but also you wouldn't have full access to the articles, so might not be super useful
• If your docs data is available via odata, maybe you can use virtual tables: Get started with virtual tables (entities) (Microsoft Dataverse) - Power Apps | Microsoft Docs (need to test this, I haven't tried virtual tables in the Portals in a while)

[Anonymous]

Hi Oliver,

thanks for your reply. 

Regarding the workaround with a complete custom search. What do you mean by API or Fetch? FetchXML? 

The Complete custom search would be implemented using Azure Cognitive Search?

And we would then somehow connect it to Dataverse and to our Docs page?

Then we integrate the Cognitive Search API into the portal and display the results similar to the default portal search?

Thanks

[OliverRodrigues]

I think it all depends on how you will retrieve the data from your docs database. Do you have access to database? or to an API with the data?

Azure Cognitive Search is a power search engine, but you need to make sure you can access your docs via Azure Cognitive Search in case you want to use that.

Connecting Dataverse to your Docs page is optional, depends if you want the data to be available in the Dataverse as well.

I think we can start this by understanding how you would have access to your docs page content.

[Anonymous]

Hi Oliver,

Serf and I are in the same team working on this topic.
So we have access to the data as we can host the documentation directly in Azure. Azure cognitive search could then index it from Azure blob.

So based on the possibilities that we have to achieve this, we would adapt our internal processes. Also hosting & publishing the documentation elsewhere.

The most important thing for us is to get a "global knowledge search" for our customers where they can search for knowledge base articles and the documentation (not in the dataverse). After they found a result they should be able to open the content page by clicking on it.

Thanks for your help in advance.

Christoph Raidl