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Microsoft has unveiled a pair of new enhancements tailored to elevate the search experience for educational users: Bing Chat Enterprise and Search Progress. These innovative features are poised to redefine the way educators and students interact with information, fostering a more efficient and insightful learning journey. Let's delve into the details of each.

Bing Chat Enterprise: A Resourceful Assistant for Educators

A groundbreaking initiative, Bing Chat Enterprise aims to revolutionize the landscape of educational assistance. Exclusively accessible to Microsoft 365 A3 and A5 subscribers, this preview feature empowers educators, faculty, and researchers with the prowess of AI-driven interactions.

Unlike its counterpart, Bing Chat, which is accessible to the broader web populace, Bing Chat Enterprise is curated solely for Microsoft 365 education users. Access necessitates the usage of a Microsoft Entra ID, secured by Azure Active Directory authentication. Faculty members can access Bing Chat Enterprise through bing.com/chat or the Microsoft Edge sidebar.

It carves a niche in drafting documents, offering insights on PDFs within the confines of Edge, content origination, and collaborative brainstorming sessions. Notably, Bing Chat Enterprise boasts robust commercial data protection, guaranteeing that user and conversational data remain impervious to leakage, access, or utilization by Microsoft or any external entities.

Search Progress: Elevating Information Literacy Skills

In partnership with Bing Chat Enterprise, Microsoft's educational arsenal introduces another transformational addition — Search Progress. This feature seeks to refine the search experience in the educational realm, focusing on students. Search Progress emerges as a learning catalyst, meticulously tracking a student's search behaviors and subsequently furnishing invaluable feedback to enhance their information literacy skills.

Underpinning Search Progress is the pivotal concept of information literacy — the adeptness to efficiently source, assess, and responsibly employ information. This feature aims to hone this proficiency within students by guiding them towards refining search queries, judiciously filtering search outcomes, meticulous source citation, and avoiding plagiarism pitfalls. By offering tailored guidance, Search Progress augments the search experience and cultivates a cadre of adept learners primed for the information-rich landscape.

With Bing Chat Enterprise and Search Progress, the quest for knowledge embarks on a transformative trajectory, one imbued with the prowess of AI and the finesse of refined information literacy skills.