Delve and Office Graph

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

The Delve name also formerly applied to Delve Analytics, which is now called MyAnalytics. (See the illustration “MyAnalytics“.)

Delve Overview, Benefits, and Risks

Delve is becoming a broad brand for 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 most visible Delve features are personalized feeds 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. Users can also find documents in Delve through a search box on the Delve home page that delivers personally targeted results in card form. Mobile applications for iOS and Android provide quick access to Delve feeds and notifications of changes. Personalized Delve feeds appear or are rolling out in many parts of the Office 365 Web interface, such as in the user profile site (also called About Me, Me, or the “people experience”) and in the new Office 365 Groups home page. (See the illustration “Delve User Profile Site“.)