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Search for Office 365 Group documents

I just got a question from someone who wanted to know how to retrieve all the Office 365 Group documents he had access to.

When you are having a lot of groups in your organization, files could be spread across them. Search is in most cases the answer to finding your documents easily. So having a property on which you can flag them as a group document would be helpful in this case.

I did a quick search on my Office 365 tenant and checked the managed properties of a document living on a standard team site and one on a group site. Luckily there is a useful property which is already provided by SharePoint called: SiteTemplate which you can use to do your query.

Show image Document living on a team site
Document living on a team site
Show image Document living in an Office 365 Group
Document living in an Office 365 Group

So if you want to retrieve all search content from Office 365 Groups, all you have to do is search for: SiteTemplate=Group.

Show image SiteTemplate query
SiteTemplate query

You can also configure this as a group search vertical so that it is easier for the user to limit their search scope.

Show image Groups search vertical
Groups search vertical

Important: Only information of public groups is searchable. Private groups are not accessible for search, so this information cannot be retrieved. You can also test this by doing in a search in the private group itself. You will see that it would not find any documents.

Show image Private group search
Private group search

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