During the average workday, let’s say you spend a fair amount of time emailing certain colleagues, conversing with others over newsfeeds and instant messaging, editing documents and collaborating on projects.
But imagine how much more productive you’d be if you had a personal assistant that could point out the most relevant tasks and conversations for you to tackle when you start your day?
For Office 365 users, that kind of personalized experience is here. Microsoft’s Delve on Office Graph provides a new user interface that presents data tailored to your working style. It acts almost like a personalized dashboard that brings together document suggestions, workflow assignments, and the people and conversations that you engage with on a regular basis.
Delve runs on the Office Graph technology. It has already been rolled out to early adopters. The search aggregator studies your behavior within Office 365 and uses that information to make suggestions. Based on the days and hours when you typically complete certain tasks, it may suggest documents you need to sign or edit, or approvals you need to give.
Delve, formerly called Oslo, has been part of the Office 365 buzz since March, when Microsoft introduced it at SharePoint Conference 2014. This shows how Microsoft plans to expand the networking and user experience capabilities of Office 365.
It’s easiest to think about Delve on Office Graph as fundamentally search-based technology. It uses search technology to study user behavior within the Office 365 environment, and use that data to help drive productivity.
Enterprise search technology supports productivity by helping you get to the content you need more quickly, but it’s not the productive work itself. Delve on Office Graph takes that support a step further. The pieces of content you work with may live in a number of different places, but this tool will aggregate them into a single view, making search technology a more intuitive and pleasant experience.
Rather than you just typing a keyword into a flat text box to search for something, Delve on Office Graph brings in the data you create as an authenticated user in Office 365 to deliver more contextually relevant results. The technology analyzes attributes about who you are, what department you’re in, what content and files you edit daily, who else accesses those files, if the file has an associated Yammer thread, etc., and then combines that data with predictive analytics to help you become more productive.
Delve on Office Graph is designed to offer a more friendly, consumer-type software experience, creating a personalized view of your own work. It integrates well with Windows 8 and 8.1, and could have an impact on the desktop experience for the user. The Delve interface looks like a page of tiles — a mixture of documents, conversations and emails that help trigger actions and point information toward you based on your activity in Office 365.
The interactive dashboard experience should change over time as it “learns” your work habits, and users also have the ability to edit their dashboards as needed. As your activity in Office 365 increases, it’ll be interesting to see how quickly and accurately Delve adapts to a user’s activities, and how it improves productivity along with the way you work in the digital workplace.
Learn more about helping your organization leverage Office 365’s growing capabilities by contacting Portal Solutions.
