Delve and Office Graph Roadmap Update

Delve is a growing set of Office 365 features to help users discover people and documents in Office 365 and to promote collaboration. Near-term improvements could help analyze employee collaboration, and longer-term improvements could target information delivery via corporate portals. The Office Graph, a service of Office 365, provides user activity information to Delve and could also be useful for applications outside of Delve, such as customer relationship management systems. However, Delve and Office Graph pose security and privacy risks, so organizations might want to limit their deployment until they understand their impact.

Delve Overview, Benefits, and Risks

Delve is becoming a broad brand for new social networking and document discovery features in Office 365, with Delve feeds as the most prominent feature.

Delve Feeds Select Content for Each User

The first Delve feature was the Delve home page, a Web page that presents a personalized feed of documents and other activity that the user might find relevant. The effect is like a Facebook or Yammer newsfeed, except that many of the entries are automatically generated from content produced by users, rather than explicitly posted by the users themselves. Personalized Delve feeds are now available in other places in the Office 365 Web interface, such as in the user profile site (also called About Me, Me, or the “people experience”) that Office 365 generates for each user. (See the illustration “Delve User Profile Site“.)