Office 365 based Delve is a cloud-based service which helps users find and discover pertinent information
across integrated Microsoft products by pulling user content from Exchange (Emails), OneDrive for Business (File Share), SharePoint 2016 (Collaboration) and Yammer (Chat). In addition to traditional search tools, Delve has a discovery function, which brings potentially relevant information to the attention of users, based on relationships and the past activity of other users within the same organisation (or company based).
How this works?
Delve users receive a personalised profile page, which includes displays for recently accessed documents, colleague profiles and a suggested-content feed. The suggested-content feed is powered by Microsoft’s Office Graph, which tracks user interactions with people and documents across Office 365 and Microsoft OneDrive for Business. It uses machine learning to determine which topics are likely to be of interest for a given user.
Note: It is important to note that Delve never presents users with content they don’t have permission to view.
Three main functions that you need to know
| Profile information | Content Cards | Boards |
| Delve users can curate their profiles to present information about themselves such as pictures, projects and skills to make it easier for colleagues to find or connect with them. Delve users can also use the people search and discovery feature to locate a colleague. Additionally, if authorised, users can review recent co-worker activity and communications, such as email through an Outlook account that’s integrated with Delve, or documents that a co-worker recently viewed or is working on for a project. Users can access the praise feature to recognise their co-workers for good work. | Documents in Delve are presented on content card displays, each of which includes a title, photo and most recent activity that help users understand why a document is relevant to their needs. The top of the content card shows which user modified the document last, and the bottom of the card records where the document is stored and the total views it has received. The picture on the card is extracted from the content of the document.
The Delve profile page includes several menus for locating previously accessed content. |
Users can also create boards to collect relevant or related documents to be accessed at a later time. Users can create a board to organise documents related to a specific project, allowing access to everyone involved in that project. This permits those additional users to see that board and contribute content cards to it. |
Mobile apps for Delve
Microsoft has published three mobile apps for Delve:
- Delve for Android
- Delve for iOS
- Delve for Windows.
Mobile app users who subscribe to Office 365 can update and curate their profiles from their mobile devices, view documents, and connect to co-workers at any time and from any location. Users also get updates on colleagues’ projects, find relevant documents and easily access documents they are actively working on.
So why use Delve? There are a few key benefits:
- From an end user perspective, using Delve is simple and straightforward. It doesn’t take long to learn how Delve is laid out and how to view and sort files.
- Office Graph’s machine learning capability takes over some of the content management and organisation that would otherwise need to be done manually.
- Delve never changes any file permissions, so private documents stay private. Viewing activity on Delve is also private.
What are some downsides of Delve?
- There’s no admin UI, so it’s difficult (or impossible) for administrators to control or report on any Delve activity.
- Content can become disorganised quickly since there’s no ability to enforce a certain
- Delve may offer more challenges at a larger organisation.
The positives of Office Delve outweigh the negatives, and we’re pretty excited about using the new technology. Please feel free to contact Prometix to understand more about Delve or any other Office 365 App and how it can be used within your organisation.
Prometix have organised a breakfast seminar – Learn how to transform your organisation with Digital Workspaces using SharePoint/Office 365 and strategies to make them usable and useful for your business case. For information and registration please click here.
About Prometix: At Prometix, we design implement and support Microsoft based technology solutions that help our client’s staff to more easily use and share information as individuals and in teams. We work with our clients to establish a structure that makes information easier to create, store, find and share with others. We’ve worked hard to understand how people want to access and share information.
For more information on our success stories please feel free to call us on (02) 8072 0666 or email enquiries@prometix.com.au
