Delve: /delv/, verb: research or make painstaking inquiries into something. “as we delve further into the atom’s secrets”
synonyms: investigate, inquire into, probe, explore, research, look into, go into; “we must delve into the matter more deeply”
Let’s take a look at another fairly neglected component of Office 365: Delve.
It’s there. It’s in the apps menu, it’s on the start page. It’s not trying to hide, it’s just waiting to be clicked on and used. Unfortunately, not many people explore Delve, and that’s too bad, because it’s really, well….cool!
So what is Delve? Microsoft defines it as follows:
Office Delve surfaces personalized content to you from across Office 365 – from OneDrive for Business, SharePoint, Exchange, Yammer and more. Powered by the Office Graph, Delve brings you information based on what you’re working on, who you’re working with; always maintaining established permissions.
In other words, it leverages Microsoft’s powerful analytic engine to surface documents and information that it deems may be relevant to what you’re doing. Therefore, instead of searching or clicking through a bunch of SharePoint sites, trying to figure out where such and such a document is, you can simply go to Delve, and chances are you’ll find it very easily.
Delve surfaces content that is relevant to what you are working on, making it easy to find documents
You can even create “boards” to let you group documents around a specific theme or subject; although these boards are open to all users, each user will still only see documents that they actually have access to in the system.
If the info your looking for doesn’t surface on the main page, then you can quickly search for a document; keep in mind that Office 365 indexes everything that you have access to, not only document titles, but the content as well: emails, notes, documents!
Searching for specific terms helps you find information fast!
In any of the cards that comes up, you will see the name of the person who worked on the document, or you can also search for people in you organization. Each user in your Office 365 tenancy has a personal profile to which everyone has access. This is a very social aspect of Office 365, and one that I advocate making use of, especially in organizations that have a very dispersed workforce. It allows users to learn about their colleagues, find information about them, and see who they’re working with and what they’re working on.
User profiles provide a wealth of information about the people in your organization
You will notice that each user also has the ability to blog, or write articles. This is also a very “social” aspect of Office 365 and certainly warrants a deeper look.
I’ll delve into that in another article! (See what I did there?)
In the meantime, if you’d like to find out more about Office 365 or how we can help you leverage the ecosystem better, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
