Installation

You just installed Universal Search from AppSource, and Business Central has not asked you to do anything with it yet. Nothing is searchable until you turn it on. Two short steps fix that: activate the free license, then tell Universal Search what to index.

Get the app from AppSource

Universal Search is free on Microsoft AppSource. From your Business Central environment:

1. Go to Extension Management, then Get more extensions (or search AppSource from the Tell Me / search icon).
2. Find Universal Search by Bitta Apps and choose Free trial. There is no trial period to track, the app itself is free.
3. Follow Microsoft's standard install prompts and let the extension finish deploying to your environment.

Tip: Business Central prompts you with an assisted setup, Set up Universal Search, right after install. You can also open it any time by typing "Universal Search" into Tell Me.

Activate the free license

Activation is optional. Search works in a grace period even if you skip it or it fails. Activating just registers your environment for a free license valid for 50 years, so in practice it is a one-time step.

The activation wizard has three steps, shown above:

1. Consent. You see exactly what is sent to Bitta Apps, LLC to issue the license: your Microsoft Entra tenant ID and domain, environment name, company name, contact email, country code, and Business Central version. Nothing is sent until you check I agree. You can decline and keep using Universal Search in grace mode.
2. Company details. Confirm or edit the company name and contact email the license registers under. Both default from Company Information.
3. Activate. Business Central sends the request and shows the result. A success moves Activation Status to Active with a License Expiry Date 50 years out. A failure shows the reason and offers Retry, and search keeps working either way.

You can re-run activation later from Universal Search Setup, using Activate Free License, to update the registered company name or email.

Turn on indexing

Nothing is searchable until Universal Search knows what to index and indexing is running.

1. Open Universal Search Setup, shown above, and use Index Configuration to choose which tables and fields are searchable. See Configuration for the full field list. Customer, Vendor, Item, and Contact are pre-configured out of the box, so there is something to search immediately.
2. Back on Universal Search Setup, choose Start Indexing. This turns on background indexing and schedules the job that keeps the index current, running once a minute.
3. To see results right away instead of waiting for the next scheduled run, open Index Configuration and choose Process Now. This runs the indexer immediately in your current session, useful the first time or right after a configuration change.

Once indexing has run, open Universal Search from the setup page, or from Tell Me, and start typing.

If activation fails in a sandbox

Activation calls Bitta Apps' license service over HTTP. A sandbox environment blocks outbound HTTP calls from extensions by default, so activation can fail there.

Note: if activation fails with a message about reaching the license service, open Extension Management, find Universal Search, and enable Allow HttpClient Requests for it, then retry. Production environments do not need this step, and search keeps working regardless of activation status.