Product Spotlight: Delve

[Anna Chu]

In the research Microsoft collected last year around IT Pros and their organizations, Delve had lower product familiarity scores than other Office 365 products. However, the data also showed that usage and adoption of Delve is increasing within high-cloud maturity organizations (defined by number of products in the cloud).

Having trouble locating documents? Need more visibility of who’s working on what? Delve may be your answer.

So, what’s the deal with Delve?

Delve is an Office 365 application that pulls in data from SharePoint, OneDrive, social apps like Yammer, and Office Graph to help you discover information and documents that are most likely to be relevant to you. Delve includes components of search, social networking and machine learning.

Each person within an organization has a profile page in Delve. On your profile page, people can see your contact information, connect with you, see who you’re working with, and what documents you are working on.  It’s important to note that they can’t view any document you’re working on—they can only view documents they already have access to.

Collaboration in Delve

You can create boards to share with a group of people. This makes it easy to collect project documents for a team, discover content and share with others. When collaborating on a document, colleagues can open the same document at the same time and see updates others are making as they simultaneously work on the document.

How does Delve surface relevant information?

Delve pulls content from across Office 365—documents stored in OneDrive, SharePoint in Office 365 or documents that have been shared with you as attachments in emails. Relevant documents are pulled using information from Office Graph. Office Graph collects analysis on what you and those around you are working on. When you and a colleague view or modify the same document, Office Graph receives a signal that you’re likely working together. Then this signal is compiled with other signals: who do you email most frequently, who have you shared documents with, who is your manager, who shares your manager. The summary of these signal elevates relevant documents that then appear on your Delve Home page.

Still not convinced?

Delve is a smart, dynamic interface for a search function. Given the collaborative nature of Office 365, Delve surfaces up content that will be of interest to a given individual at a specific time. This also helps identify subject matter experts on topics within an organization. By monitoring document creation and usage, Delve creates a personalized user feed that functions as both an enhance search function and employee directory.

For more information check out the Delve Community on Tech Community and join the conversation.

Have questions? The Delve Support page has answers to your questions around setting up Delve and discovering and organizing documents. Also be sure to check out @Naomi Moneypenny’s recent blog post around the role of Delve in harnessing collective knowledge!

[#2]

Great roundup Anna, with a nice set of resources.

I found Delve was sometimes misunderstood and that it needed additional explaining to put management as well as end-users at ease. Microsofts material in this regards is good but staff were sometimes still uncomfortable around Delve and who had access to what. We addressed this during training and that went a long way.

[#3]

That is commonly the first question asked after a Delve session is delivered at a Microsoft event! Would love to know if there is an on-demand version of your training? I'd like to check it out.

[#4]

great read and Cian is right. See that happening a lot till they do a CIE or something like that.

[#5]

Hi Anna,

Great resume ! 

[#6]

I don't have access to the material anymore unfortunately but it was a straight forward approach.  It was direct in addressing that Devle is personalised for every user and what you see, isn't what someone else will see, as such.

That was a key point because staff saw a mix of their own documents and other people's documents side by side, some thought their files were not secure.  Also explaining how Delve picks up on signals, who you work with and how you collaborate to surface the most relevant information, again I think helped quite a bit.  

Devle I think will expose your IA sometimes to possible unintentional consequences, where perhaps the permission model that has been implemented isn't always as strong as you thought but that's not Delve's fault and is correctable!

[#7]

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@Cian Allner wrote:

Devle I think will expose your IA sometimes to possible unintentional consequences, where perhaps the permission model that has been implemented isn't always as strong as you thought but that's not Delve's fault and is correctable!

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Totally!  If anything Delve is helping people be more vigilant about the security of the documents they share. And it is a huge timesaver for me too. Instead of having to wait for someone to get back to me, or back from vacation, I can easily find that slide deck they shared with me previously. No more 'Can you please share the deck with me?' - it's already available to those I set permissions to share it with.

[#8]

Couldn't agree more! Big fan of Delve, it's so adept at gathering useful resources together.  The Windows 10 app is nice as well, I found it made working with Office 365 even more convenient.

Going back to the wider point about potential resistance to Delve, there can be a leaning to simply turning it off in more extreme cases.  As well as being able to opt-out, disabling Office Graph is such a drastic step though removing much of Office 365's cleverness, hopefully, most organizations don't go that far.  

[#9]

Delve is an incredibly powerful tool in the suite. When I demonstrate Delve, adoption of OneDrive and SharePoint increases 15-25% in the following two weeks.

The downside to this is, as I demonstrate and train my customers they become comfortable relying on Delve to show them their information.

Delve has mysteriously lost "data" multiple times. I, personally, have submitted multiple support tickets (and I have written posts within this tech community site) about this.

If my users create boards and populate them with data, only to come back in a week or two and there are no objects in the Board (or in their Favorites), then they lose confidence not just in Delve, but the whole O365 suite.

Product stability is required before being able to deliver this to an enterprise as a viable tool.

[#10]

Great feedback Bill, and that makes me think can end-users become overreliant on Delve? I have seen Delve throw up some oddities from time to time, like suddenly not showing anything, that generally sorts itself after a few days.

Delve shouldn't transpose end-users being able to navigate and understand the layout of their team sites and document libraries? Delve is for convenience and bringing together stuff that you might miss otherwise, as well as features like boards.

[#11]

+1, @Naomi Moneypenny as FYI :-). Delve is a great guide to the content divide that exists over time and augments the productivity workstreams we all engage in under the weight of exponential content and data growth - and yes, we're always interested in fededback, explicit and implicit, that helps refine the experience and certainly own up to making it accurate and safe.