Configure Atlas Search Scopes

Please note that this is considered Advanced Configuration for Atlas and requires Microsoft 365 Tenant Administrator permissions. Ownership of the workspace is not sufficient.

By moving from the default configuration to a custom one you will lose multi-lingual capabilities for the Search scopes and they will only be shown in the language you set them up in.

Atlas includes a number of Search Scopes which help users to find content more easily. When clicking the Atlas Search button in the top right you will see the following search options by default:

These options allow users to determine the type of content they expect to find before searching which can help reduce the time it takes to find information.

If you wish to change, remove or add to the Search Scopes this can be achieved by following these steps.

In this article:

• Access the Tenant Properties page
• Manage the available Search scopes
  • Change to a Global configuration
  • Remove search scopes
  • Add new scopes for custom Listing pages
• Troubleshooting

Access the Tenant Properties page

1. Navigate to the Atlas Configuration workspace. This workspace can be found by searching for "configuration" in Atlas ConneX, or by manually navigating to the site at /sites/atlasconfiguration in your M365 tenant.
2. Go to Site contents in the top right menu:
   
3. Click on the Site Pages library (at the bottom of this list) to open it, find the page Tenant-Properties.aspx and open the page. If you see the following message then you do not have sufficient permissions to make the changes and will need to speak to an Administrator:
   
4. If you have sufficient permissions then you'll see something more like this:
   

Manage the available Search scopes

Once you have accessed the Tenant Properties page as above, follow these steps to update the Search Scopes in your Atlas deployment:

1. Scroll down or use the Search box in the page to find the item Atlas.SearchScopes.Groups:
   
2. Select this item then click Edit at the top of the list. A panel will open on the right hand side showing the configuration of this property:
   
3. You can now make changes to this configuration, but take care when making changes. Before making changes we recommend copying the full VALUE text from the panel and pasting it into a text editor - even just Notepad. You could also save a copy of this in case you need to revert your changes.
4. In your chosen text editor you can make changes to the code to change the configuration. The most common changes are:
   • To change the configuration to use a global set of Listing pages instead of Listing pages per workspace
   • To remove specific scopes that are not required
   • To add new scopes for custom Listing pages.
5. Each scope is defined by the key and URL:
   • { @@key@@: @@SearchDashboard@@,
     @@url@@: @@/sitepages/Search-Dashboard.aspx@@ }
6. Each scope must be placed within a group:
   • [    {    @@group@@: @@Default@@, <scopes> ]
7. Once you have made the changes you need, paste the updated code back into the VALUE field then click Save at the bottom of the panel:
   
   
   

Change to a Global configuration

If you are making changes to the out of the box Listing pages in Atlas then you may find that you want to send all searches to the same workspace rather than always defaulting to the current workspace. This means that if you are changing the Listing page you only need to do this once per content type, then you can send all those searches to a single page.

In the scopes, you will see that by default all the URLs are relative, for example the default for the All search points to /sitepages/Search-Dashboard.aspx relative to the current workspace.

To change one or more scopes to use a global configuration instead, you simply need to replace each URL with the full URL to the Listing page you want to use. So for example if the Atlas workspace you want to point your searches to is at https://mytenant.sharepoint.com/sites/atlas you would update the URLs in the configuration from /sitepages/{PAGE}.aspx to https://mytenant.sharepoint.com/sites/atlas/sitepages/{PAGE}.aspx. Because the URL is now fully defined searches will always go to the specified workspace.

• Once you have made the changes you need, paste the updated code back into the VALUE field then click Save at the bottom of the panel:
  

Remove search scopes

To remove search scopes from the configuration so that they are no longer exposed to users from the search panel, you simply need to remove the associated key and URL from the configuration.

In the following screenshot, 2 code blocks are highlighted representing two different scopes. To remove a scope, you would need to remove the full block, including the curly brackets and the trailing comma, unless it is the last block in a section in which case there may be a square bracket instead. Make sure you pay attention to the formatting to ensure you don't break the code.

Therefore to remove for example the All scope or FAQs scope, as you can see above they are each contained within curly brackets and followed with a comma, so you'd want to remove the whole of one of the highlighted text blocks to remove that scope.

• Once you have made the changes you need, paste the updated code back into the VALUE field then click Save at the bottom of the panel:
  

Add new scopes for custom Listing pages

If you have configured custom content types on top of Atlas which need their own Listing page, or for example you have created a copy of the Documents Listing with some built-in filtering, for example only showing Policies & Procedures documents, you may want to add this Listing page as an additional search scope to appear in the search panel.

Each block will look like the below and you'll need to add it within the square brackets [ ] of the section you want the scope to appear in:

• { @@key@@: @@KnowledgeExternalInsights@@, @@url@@: @@/sitepages/external-insights.aspx@@ },

If you are making this the last scope in that section you will need to remove the trailing comma before the ending square bracket ] for that section, but you'll also need to add the trailing comma after the previous scope if it used to be the last one.

• Once you have made the changes you need, paste the updated code back into the VALUE field then click Save at the bottom of the panel:
  

Troubleshooting

If you are unsure how to approach this please speak to your CSM or raise a ticket and we can help.

If you've made your code changes and the code is not valid you should first try to verify the syntax of each code block and ensure they have the right brackets and commas around them. If you cannot identify the problem please contact our support team and include the code you've created.