Searching for Skills and Interests

Brass Contributor

In our profiles, we have the Skills and Interests fields, where we can enter things we're skilled in, as well as things we're interested in. When I do a search in Delve however, it only picks up results in our job titles or in our profile text. How do we connect with people that have similar interests, or connect with people who have certain skills we need?

13 Replies
Unfortunately, you cannot currently do this. This has been a big weakness of Delve ever since it was released. I have no idea why MS has not added this basic level of functionality. Hopefully the upcoming rollout of some new functionality for Delve profiles will include this.

Yes myself and Dean posted about this in the old O365 Network in Yammer. Only way is to use the People Search in SPO which will allow you to search on the majority of fields in the Profiles to date. Hopefully they will imrpove the search capabilities but I think in order to that they would need to unify the search across all services within O365. It would be great if you could search a phrase and it was able to pull this from BIOS, previous Email conversations......

 

I have a similar question. We wish to tag content across SPO and Yammer and have that returned in the Delve search using the deleve search url and own unique ID as a parameter.  We would like to be able to bring back all knowledge and people related to a certain technology as part of our Knowledge Base.  As things stand I can return documents from SPO, OneDrive and also Office 365 Video. I cannot bring back People Information (see attached) and I cannot seem to bring back Yammer contents.  Is this correct behaviour or can this be amended? 

 

Is there a document that provides an overview around what content and resources Delve can index? 

Hi @Craig Stanley,


I think the issue here is that Delve only lifts certain profile fields from SPO User profile service. We can obviously make some fields in the UPS Indexed but what affect that has I can't be sure for Delve. I find Delve useful but annoying when trying to get it to work in a more tailored way for the end user, the other issue is that MS stand point is this whole solution is in constant development so changes can happen at any point meaning, planning to use it for a specific busiuness case is almost imposbbile. My example was I had custom properties and also Out of the box ones with custome names (Something that the Business could relate to). When the update happened to the modern look that was all lost, this created a large number of calls in tot he Service desk and a comms had to be sent out, guidance had to be given, in all it was a mess.

 

My opinion for what you have descibed is to not try rely on delve for your solution, use it as it's currently intended by MS and hopefully they'll have a solution that we can rely on, has a proper update lifecycle so we can manage communications to the business etc.


This was helpful when it first started out, but of course things have changed -

http://blogs.perficient.com/microsoft/2014/09/everything-you-need-to-know-about-delve/

 

Many thanks

 

 

In my test tenant set to First Release, I see the ability to execute Delve searches for people with specific skills or other things in their profile - which is great!  However I haven't been able to find any timeline or other confirmation that this change will indeed be pushed soon to standard tenants.  Does anyone know? 

November 2017 now.. and I have just read this from the Connect And Collaborate in Delve page...

" Find information about - and through - other people

  • Click a person's name or picture anywhere in Delve to go to their profile page.

    You can also use search in the upper left corner to find someone.

    You can now search for people by skills, projects, education, or other information they have added to their profile."

below this is...

Note: Searching for people by skills, projects, education, and so on, is currently only available if your organization has opted in to the First Release program

 

We are on First Release... but still can't work out a way to search on skills or projects.  Any clues?

The answer was patience.... it took about 3 hours to index,  then using delve search.... type a search term and select search people...

a lot of large companies have a disparate set of systems holding skills and expertise data. Their key driver is to easily find the right SME for a particular job or someone who has had experience in a particular technology or role. The ability to make their delve profile fully searchable would fit this bill straight away. The only slight negative would be you would have to rely on the user to update their profile so further down the line some form of integration into HR and L&D systems would need to be considered too but that would be a culture and user adoption issue.

a lot of large companies have a disparate set of systems holding skills and expertise data. Their key driver is to easily find the right SME for a particular job or someone who has had experience in a particular technology or role. The ability to make their delve profile fully searchable would fit this bill straight away. The only slight negative would be you would have to rely on the user to update their profile so further down the line some form of integration into HR and Learning and Development systems would need to be considered too but that would be a culture and user adoption issue.

We have been working with Microsoft Support on a number of Delve questions and queries relating to searching accross SharePoint, Office365 Video and People Info. We understand better what is indexed and when and how you can get around the current limitations within the product.

 

We now have a good way forward for our use of Delve but to address some specific People Search Limitations we have developed a simple PowerBI Dashboard that provides a simple method of searching and filtering People via skills.

 

This allows us a way to "show all First Aiders, Health and Safety or Union Reps" or filter users by departament and directorate. By going down the Power BI route we have been able to bring together AD, SharePoint and Yammer details and add options to send email messages and text messages direct from the dashboard.  We are using this to develop a simple touch screen experience for our Reception Areas.

 

Is there a method of extracting URLS for User Profile pages in Delve?

 

 

This sounds fantastic @Craig Stanley.  Would there be any way to see a screenshot/snapshot of the dashboard without infringing any Privacy or IP?  Did you develop this yourselves or outsource?

Chris 

Just as a follow up to previous discussions we have used the following to present up a People / Skills type search experience. 

 

The elements we have used are 

 

  1. Power BI Report pulling in People data and Hierarchy from AD and O365
  2. Social Network Graph Visualisation within our Power BI Reports
  3. PowerApps to provide a home page and a locked down navigation and kiosk style experience navigating through a number of tiles. 

 

This is allowing us to navigate and find People via teams, skills and also elements such as Union Rep, First Aider. 

Any more information on how this works? Sounds fantastic!