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The Future of Delve

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Having noticed conversations popping up here and on Twitter about the future of Delve in Office 365 I’d like to put out a question to the Microsoft guys and girls on here about the future roadmap. The lack of updates around Boards and Blogs is evident. We’re happy to recognise the advances of Microsoft Graph across the Office 365 suite but clarity on Delve would be welcome. Thoughts @Mark Kashman @Dan Holme @Naomi Moneypenny? Happy to hear from other Microsoft stakeholders.
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Yep, totally agree here...Delve was a very promising feature, but the lack of any improvements / updates is simply not understandable

Very interested in this as well!

 

I think the writing is on the wall but it would be good to get some specifics if that's anywhere near right.  This is, for me, is the biggest clue Delve is not flavour of the month, along with the Windows 10 app being chopped:

 

"At Microsoft, our vision of search in the enterprise centers on bringing personalized search results to wherever you may be working, from across your intranet, and even the internet. By infusing artificial intelligence (AI) into our familiar experiences in Office, search and discovery become part of your everyday work, rather than a separate destination."

 

This integrated, smarter search is out soon, via the MC, in SharePoint Online and I think is indicative of these features being available wherever you are in Office 365, extending into Windows 10.

 

"The search experience has been redesigned and streamlined to make it easier for you to find and filter results. Results are ranked based on personal relevance as determined by your collaborative behaviors in the Microsoft Graph and results will now include people, list items, and news."

 

Anyway, that's enough of my supposition!

 

I am interested as well cause we saw Personal search at Ignite so what is the extra value of delve going to be or evolved? Would be nice to get some input as I still like the idea of delve and it can be very powerfull in your organisation

Related to Delve, I would also like to know the future of Profiles, will there be a home for them (People Explorer?) that integrates LinkedIn when Delve no longer exists? People Explorer would allow you to click on a skill or fact like University and see all the people with that same thing. [EDIT: I just found something close to this in the new search capability]

 

Second, personal blogs. We have a few people who go to the trouble of digging through Delve to write a personal blog, but they are never surfaced and there is no Home Base for people to see them (unless I am missing something).

 

So much potential, so little "there" there...

At Ignite Microsoft said it are seperated graph's and that is why you can not get full profile into Office 365. Maybe in the future they will merge but I think not in the short run

Thanks for the response... I don't get what that means in practical terms. *What are the different graphs?

As a side note, we have been exploring better use of People search and have a lot of old profiles. They are lingering in the Site Collection profiles, which I don't really know what those are. About 5% of our former employees have some lingering profile even though they have been removed from Sharepoint and account deleted.
Rob, I’ve noticed the old profile problem too. Note the common problems this discussion has prompted. In my original entry I copied the Microsoft leads and would value a reply. People invest in the platform and while the ‘speed of the cloud’ means constant change clearing up what’s gone before is important. Once again @Mark Kashman @Dan Holme @Naomi Moneypenny we’re looking to you for feedback in the most positive way.

Lots of Delve style features on Office.com landing page now, too. 

 

Seems like only a matter of time before Delve is quietly decommissioned.

I always liked Delve, but struggled to identify the trigger, in terms of either situation or need, "when people would reach for it."

 

I remember at one Ignite conference keynote, listening to Julia White positioning Delve as where she starts her day, in order to get a feel for the context of her projects, team and the organization, before diving into any direct messaging. But clearly that didn't take root, as I never saw that again. 

 

From my (admittedly incredibly limited) point of view, the Delve team has not been highly aggressive in its messaging around "when and why" so much as "what it can do."

 

I have a strong bias against feature-oriented analyses of tools for exactly this reason. Features are rarely unique, unless they're dependent on exclusive integrations or some other special sauce. As I've written elsewhere, a breakthrough this week is a checked box next quarter, as platforms and tools converge.

 

Focusing on "when and why," on the other hand, is always germane. Consider Teams and Yammer, where the feature overlap is epic. But...I reach for Teams when I need to work with my team on a project with a PowerBI dashboard (inner loop). I reach for Yammer when I want to leverage a company-wide PowerBI group of thousands, for help or ideas or updates (outer loop).

 

Backing away from the soapbox now, and waiting on people with much better creds to tell us what's going on behind the curtains.

 

 

Thanks Melanie, as always,for your thoughtful and considered reply..

 

I agree with your analysis on features yet this is exactly where I’ve been caught out and I suspect others have too. Both boards and blogs are features that need to be developed and roadmapped either inside or outside Delve in Office 365.

 

I’ve been genuinely impressed with the improvements in the Microsoft Graph of which Delve was most definitely the poster child. It is inevitable on an initiative as large as Office 365 that some ideas grow and others do not. I’d appreciate a mature response from Microsoft, as considered and insightful as yours, outlining their plans.

 

Delve shone brightly and helped shape Office 365. Let’s recognise that and retire the product in clear support of customers.


John Wynne wrote: 

Both boards and blogs are features that need to be developed and roadmapped either inside or outside Delve in Office 365.

 

Agree!

 

 

I’ve been genuinely impressed with the improvements in the Microsoft Graph [...]

  

I don't doubt this, but how has the Graph improved?

 

Hey gang, I have a post that we published at my company and was wondering what this community thought of it. I'm curious to know how the post -- centered around adoption -- compares to you all's experience. How difficult is it to secure end user adoption? How tough is it to get it to stick? Thanks!

https://www.avepoint.com/blog/strategy-blog/delve-adoption-office-365/

So, I hope this lands constructively, as it's meant to be... I believe "candor is love" in addition to saving everybody time.

 

That post is not really about Delve adoption, is it? It's about Delve features that may help with O365 adoption. The part about "when and why to go to Delve" is minimal.**

 

At my org, we see the Delve view now when we use our intranet search and click to a second-level (click on an individual name) in personal search results. That's the only time I ever see it, and is rare indeed; I had to click to an expanded view of my apps to find it, and had a momentary thought of, "did MyCo turn it off?"

 

And I care a LOT more than the average bear in MyCo about what's in the waffle and how it can make me and my teams and my company more productive. Most others won't be that motivated.

 

**I will say on the positive side, that from your blog I learned that Delve is supposed to surface content from wherever I stored it in O365, which is a holy grail cut in half.

 

Why half? Because at MyCo we also have people saving files to desktop, shared drives, blah blah blah. But hey, if their worry is that they saved something in OneNote or Teams Files or OneDrive or Yammer Files and forgot which, this would be one of those "hallelujah choir" things... if I was fully confident that this is what Delve offers.

 

I'm guessing there are limitations in fine print? After all, Teams Files aren't even a year old yet and we just got Files surfaced in Yammer in my tenant last month.

 

Anyone who tells me, correctly, "yes really, no fine print" would be my favorite person for quite some time. Because that "find it from anywhere in O365" would offer a carrot I could (and would) dangle in front of my users to indeed, get more adoption of Office365 solutions, AND Delve. 

 

We recently enabled Delve and there was a huge push by our IT department as it would make "everyone's lives better" and increase the use of O365.  I'd say people are more confused then before and aren't using it.  There either needs to be some change to Delve/Graph or we are going to find people just won't see the value.


Issues we are seeing thus far:

1. People seeing content from public Outlook Groups they are not a part of or member of.

2. Seeing content from SharePoint sites, where they are a visitor, yet never been to the site. 

 

This is either going to mean that all groups need to be private and each SharePoint site will require custom permissions and there won't be such thing as a Visitors group that includes everyone. 

 

I would like to assume with SharePoint and Groups, you would only see content that you've either collaborated on or are a member of.  This is really confusing and cluttering peoples Delve....I hope we can see some changes to the algorithm soon.

*This* is why Delve needs to be maintained and refreshed. Where customers have invested in promoting Delve to their users a clear roadmap is needed. I would certainly agree about seeing unrelated content. It’s a concern. I do see a lot of value in the Graph and the new cross asset approach makes sense and works well. We can only put our thoughts here and hope the relevant Microsoft read them. Thanks for sharing your experience.

Delve, like Search surfaces information from the "sources" that connects with Office Graph. So, yes, you get content from "all of O365" if connected (that's the fine print). Last I heard, Teams did not connect yet (but it's on their roadmap), so Teams conversation content does now show up in Delve or Search. Files in Teams do show up, because those files are in a group/SharePoint backend that does connect with Graph. 

Btw, this is the old "push" vs. "pull" discussion.  I find Delve useful in that it pushes information to me when I would not necessarily go find it for myself.  Search pulls the information to me.

Now, I too would be interested in finding out more about the future of Delve...

I too am interested in the future of Delve. There were some great features there--some of my users loved the Boards--but nothing has happened on them in a long time. Any news would be welcome.

And still nothing on Delve. Anyone attend the recent SharePoint conference in Vegas? Was it talked about there?

And still nothing on Delve. Anyone attend the recent SharePoint conference in Vegas? Was it talked about there?

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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. :)

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