Forum Discussion
The Future of Delve
We certainly understand and know the pain point. We've been focused on enabling good authoring experience, feel we can offer a good team or executive (CxO) style blog with a dedicated communication site + news approach; esp with coming organizational news. But alas, the personal blog alludes explicit. One can publish news often in many locations (to a team site, to a comm site, to a hub site) and the feed of it goes out to people they are related to, even if the person is not active in the site where it gets published, the Microsoft Graph knows the relations and serves up as best a "feed" it can to each user - without requiring that person to "go to someone's blog." That said, the heads are noodling in these areas for sure. One thing you got me thinking about was a way to present all news someone publishes in all places they can, and seeing the feed through the eyes of what the person logged in has permissions to view. So you would see someone's "blog" but only have visibility to the content you're allowed to view. Just thinking out loud. let's loop in John_Sanders who is our news guru these days to review and possibly add some comments; plus Dave Cohen (US) who owns some of these pieces, too. :-)
Mark-KashmanNaomi MoneypennyAnne MichelsJeremy ThakeI encourage you to read what @Rob O’Keefe has written up today. It really articulates a real world scenario within Office 365. Is it possible for you all to collectively state where and when the pieces ‘will pop in place’? This really is golden feedback in my opinion. Thanks!
We certainly understand and know the pain point. We've been focused on enabling good authoring experience, feel we can offer a good team or executive (CxO) style blog with a dedicated communication site + news approach; esp with coming organizational news. But alas, the personal blog alludes explicit. One can publish news often in many locations (to a team site, to a comm site, to a hub site) and the feed of it goes out to people they are related to, even if the person is not active in the site where it gets published, the Microsoft Graph knows the relations and serves up as best a "feed" it can to each user - without requiring that person to "go to someone's blog." That said, the heads are noodling in these areas for sure. One thing you got me thinking about was a way to present all news someone publishes in all places they can, and seeing the feed through the eyes of what the person logged in has permissions to view. So you would see someone's "blog" but only have visibility to the content you're allowed to view. Just thinking out loud. let's loop in John_Sanders who is our news guru these days to review and possibly add some comments; plus Dave Cohen (US) who owns some of these pieces, too. :-)
Mark-Kashman any updates since June of 2018 on:
- Personal blogs -- how to surface them?
- Profiles -- please can you make this a more robust feature
- future of Delve
- Greater integration of LinkedIn, what is the direction?
John Wynne and others in this thread would like to hear more! We are your ambassadors on the front lines.
I did notice an improved display for a person's set of blog posts at:
https://TenantName.sharepoint.com/portals/hub/personal/XYZ
Where XYZ is the user name. I was going to advise our company to just start trying people's pages randomly, or manually create a list of people I know to have blogs. One weird thing is if you put in that URL with a non-existent user you end up at the Video Portal which is disorienting. I guess since there is no blog home base, they had to pick somewhere to go??
Hoping for some updated information, even if just directional.
Rob.
Thanks for the reply Mark-Kashman, the value of this community is when MSFT leaders come and share. We don't expect you to have all the answers but at least giving some insight to the current thinking.
Having said that, you answered about personal blogs (which would be good to hear about), but this thread is about several things -- Delve, the profile page, blogs, and LinkedIn too. You want us to build communities in our companies, and we are all on board. The heart of communities within a company is the extended profile -- who the person is, the role, their work, and their point of view. Yammer is great for shorter form, but beyond that we should make a Communications Site for employee blogs? If the existing blogs are not a thing you plan on supporting, let us know so we can start phasing them out. Does anyone at Microsoft write internal blogs? If so, in what part of the platform?
Please continue to share here, it is much appreciated!
Rob.
RobOK wrote:Thanks for the reply Mark-Kashman, the value of this community is when MSFT leaders come and share. We don't expect you to have all the answers but at least giving some insight to the current thinking.
Having said that, you answered about personal blogs (which would be good to hear about), but this thread is about several things -- Delve, the profile page, blogs, and LinkedIn too. You want us to build communities in our companies, and we are all on board. The heart of communities within a company is the extended profile -- who the person is, the role, their work, and their point of view. Yammer is great for shorter form, but beyond that we should make a Communications Site for employee blogs? If the existing blogs are not a thing you plan on supporting, let us know so we can start phasing them out. Does anyone at Microsoft write internal blogs? If so, in what part of the platform?
Please continue to share here, it is much appreciated!
Rob.
Mark-Kashman Is there any progress on Profiles? If you could mature them and surface them more, it would be great. For example, I want the skills, projects, and schools to be clickable so I can see all people with the same tag.
Is anything being done in this area?
Rob.
We don't use blogs here at the moment (and I don't expect them to take off) but we do have colleagues on Yammer who have created a 'personal' group and post like a blog. They work incredibly well for a mostly non-desk based workforce. In fact one of our most interesting groups is the blog from one of our door men ...
Diageo do the same thing with a group for the CEO who posts his musings every Sunday evening. I'm hoping we replicate this here as well.
Garry @ Selfridges
- Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts Mark-Kashman. It’s great to get Microsoft team engagement. On a more prosaic level I’m still struggling with the Future of Delve. All the pieces have come to represent a product and it’s if we need to disaggregate it and officially find new homes for each feature and then deprecate Delve itself. Getting acknowledgment on that and a roadmap would be great. Nevertheless, really respect you coming here to take part in this thread.
Appreciate the transparency Mark.
I do like the idea of a blog related to a person's profile and not related to a site (some other collab platforms have the same idea). But, given the current state of the Delve blog (and Delve as a "thing" generally) it might be better to remove the feature than limp along in the current state. I certainly don't view it as a high priority for the SharePoint/OneDrive team.
I know there's infrastructure related to OneDrive that might be a place for personal "pages" to be stored, maybe that's a solution.
If we move away from the existing blogs, I'd hope Microsoft would provide a way to transition content from the old system to the new. I can't be the only one using the Blog functionality.
Right now Blogs is the main thing I use Delve for. Boards could be very useful but rely on everyone playing nice and storing documents on OneDrive/SharePoint. Blogs are great to create an aide memoire for myself and to record information in a way that other people can access if they want/need, especially whe it's somethignt hat doesn't relate to a specific team (organisational unit), Team (on Teams) or project. For example I attended Evolve Conference yesterday and will over the next few days type up my notes from the talks I attended. Most of what I learned there isn't connected to any project I'm on at the moment, nor does it relate a specific team/Team in our organisation, but it might be useful background for someone or cause management to say "Hey, Stephen seems to know a bit about this, we'll put him on the new, hot and interesting project we're about to kick off."
If Blogs in Delve do die I hope there will be an opportunity to export the content and republish elsewhere. I suppose I could always copy-paste into my Wordpress?
