ANNOUNCEMENT | Intelligence-powered search, Delve, and Microsoft Graph updates
Published Feb 16 2017 07:54 AM 76.4K Views
Microsoft

Microsoft puts people at the center of collaboration. In today’s demanding business climate, it is common for people to get overwhelmed by the ever-growing amount of data and documents swirling about. That’s why Office 365 infuses intelligence into experiences across the suite, like Delve, which provides insights to inform business decisions and connect you with the right content and the right people.

 

At the heart of it, Microsoft uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to provide unique, personalized experiences throughout. Users are guided to the right emails, files, sites, videos, news articles and more - in context with where they are already working.

 

Today, we’re starting to roll out a new, personalized search experience in Office 365, along with improvements to Delve, all powered by the Microsoft Graph.

 

Let’s dive into the details.

 

Personalized search coming to a Delve search box near you

Office 365 is growing from a usage and storage perspective. And specific to search, the content indexing service is growing steadily at 10 percent month-over-month (MOM) – proof that users may be more challenged to find the right people and content.

 

Today Delve delivers search results that are informed by who you work with, and what you work on, starting at the moment you begin typing in the Search box. With its new updates, Delve will provide even more personalized search experience in two ways:

 

  • Get back to what you were doing—When you click in the Search text box and before you type anything, you will see result items appear based on your most recent work. As you type, you'll see a refinement of results related to the keywords you enter.
  • Discover new information—Once you press Return, you enter the discovery phase where you are searching content, people (based on name and expertise), and sites from throughout your organization. Content is presented in the order of what is most relevant to you. For example, documents by people you work with will typically rank higher than documents by other people. Similarly, documents on SharePoint sites you work on would be ranked higher.

 

Delve_Personalized-Search_v2.gif

 

The new, intelligent search experience from within Office Delve.

 

Delve_personalized-search_immediate-results.pngDelve_personalized-search_fast-refinements.png

Immediate results when you click into the Delve search box. (Left) Fast refinement of content as you type ahead. (Right) All relevant to the user who is signed in.

 

Check it out at delve.office.com - the new Delve experience –home of search and discovery. It provides a more personalized view of content trending around a user’s work social sphere.

 

Learn more about Delve personalized search.

 

Microsoft Graph improvements for Office 365

The content, activity, people and recommendations that surface in Delve and other intelligent experiences are powered by Microsoft Graph, which has recently been enhanced to surface more personalized insights in Office 365. The Microsoft Graph is designed as an intelligent and intelligible assistant with sophisticated protections to help secure personal and group information in ways that earn trust.

 

New insights come from Office 365 Groups and Outlook modern attachments – Microsoft Graph derives intelligence from things like who you work with, what departments your colleagues are from, what sites you work on, the content you share and have in common, and what sites the people around you are using. that which now also includes documents from Office 365 Groups, modern attachments from Outlook, and more. There is business value in all transactions. The breadth of content plays an important role, not only to surface important people and content, it, too, enables a more personalized, relevant experience based on these added signals of content and people interactions.

 

Improved performance and content freshness—In addition to relevance improvements, Microsoft Graph results are returned faster with improved success rates and content freshness (the time it takes for new content to appear within results). Relevance context is now pre-processed and sent along with the query on the search index. All the while maintaining admin and users requirement and expectation of the highest level of data security and privacy.

 

And more to come

As we begin roll out of the updated search experience in Delve, we also have our sights on enabling intelligent search from within additional Office 365 applications like SharePoint home in Office 365 and mobile apps, OneDrive for Business and more.

 

Please visit our Delve UserVoice and submit your feedback. Follow us on Twitter @OfficeDelve. And if you have a specific question on any of the above, please add a comment below and we'll provide as much clarity as we can.

 

— Mark Kashman, senior product manager for the Office 365 team

 

Frequently asked questions

Q: When will personalized search roll out in my Office 365 tenant?

A: The new personalized search experience in Office Delve is rolling out to First Release customers in the next week. We then expect to begin worldwide rollout to all Office 365 by this summer.

 

Q: Does the new personalized search experience in Delve affect my enterprise search center in SharePoint Online?

A: No. There is no impact to customers’ enterprise search center. Nor do the updates affect access points to the classic search center customers may have put in place.

 

Q: Should I be concerned about private or sensitive data in Delve search results?

A: No. Delve never changes any permissions on content or other information. Users only discover what they already have permission to see. This includes how content is presented in Delve search results. To learn more, please review the recent Microsoft Tech Community post to understand security and privacy of Delve and intelligent experiences in Office 365.

9 Comments

Hi Mark,

 

Could you please clarify, coming deployment will be for entire tenant on First Release or for the selected users on First Release?

 

Thank you

>delve.office.com

 

Finally a good URL!

 

Great set of features.  I really wish the next step for Delve would be for me to set up a feed on specific people I myself choose, in addition to the machine-chooses-for-me format. Some of the people who show up in my feed today are people I'm in meetings with but I really don't want/need to see their updates.

Microsoft

@Sergei Baklan; I'm working on getting an answer for you. We will begin first release rollout next week and will have an answer back to you within the next 1-2 days from the Oslo team.

Microsoft

@Kevin Crossman; good feedback and I'll ensure to sheppard it to our team in Oslo.

Steel Contributor

Hi,

First of all, great work :)

 

@Mark Kashman you mention SharePoint Home in the post. To me it makes sense to unify the search result page from both Delve and SP Home - as they are very similar, but different. Which should a user pick, and when/why?

 

Also, can you expand on the freshness improvements and what pre-calculated relevance context means?

 

thanks,

-m

Some teething issues:

 

1. Delve loses me after I move around. Refreshing the app doesn't help. Neither does signing in and out of Office 365. I had to wait for 15 minutes or so before Delve recognized my existence (again)!

Delve can't find meDelve can't find me

2. Clicking on a board occasionally spins wheels and does nothing else. And there are documents pinned to these boards!

 

Spinning wheels and no documentsSpinning wheels and no documents

 3. My Home screen has no documents. But trust me, I have added lots to OneDrive and SharePoint... The Me view is fine as is "My Recent Documents"...

Where are my documents gone?Where are my documents gone?

 Great blog post Mark, keep up the good work on Delve!

Deleted
Not applicable

I do believe that this is way people will be expecting to to have relevant information presented to them. So all good there.

 

But how will Delve help people find relevant information that isn't current nor related to the colleagues currently interacted with?

 

A client of mine is asking, as they are about to set up a large number of team sites within SharePoint Online.

 

They are leaning towards abandonding reliance on the term store taxonomy (they have one for their on-prem SharePoint), but don't know what they ought to implement instead.

 

Does anyone have some good advice to provide?

 

Thanks, Magnus

 

 

Brass Contributor

@Mark Kashman Thanks for the detailed post. I was wondering where we are on this Delve search experience. We are in the First release program, and I do remember experiencing this new search briefly at some point, but I am unable to see this in our tenant now. Could you kindly clarify/confirm what's status on this? If its already deployed and we should see it, then do you suggest I raise a support ticket for a bug? Thanks!

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