Microsoft announced last night an upcoming wave of improvements to its Office 365 Delve application, offering more personalized and more useful search results inside of your enterprise. Similar updates are also heading to Microsoft Graph and the products that rely on its functionality.
Delve is an Office 365 application designed to surface content and people in your organization quickly and efficiently, to help you get more work done. Delve can highlight not only the people you’re most likely to interact with in your org chart, but also the documents they’re handling, projects you’re collaborating on and other useful information.
Delve, which is based on the AI-assisted Microsoft Graph, surfaces all types of information based on your permissions, position and other personal info it knows about you and your colleagues. But with this new wave of updates, it will be able to offer even more useful results. Per Microsoft’s announcement Delve will enhance your experience in two new ways:
- Get back to what you were doing—When you click in the Search text box and before you type anything, you will see result items appear based on your most recent work. As you type, youll see a refinement of results related to the keywords you enter.
- Discover new information—Once you press Return, you enter the discovery phase where you are searching content, people (based on name and expertise), and sites from throughout your organization. Content is presented in the order of what is most relevant to you. For example, documents by people you work with will typically rank higher than documents by other people. Similarly, documents on SharePoint sites you work on would be ranked higher.
Meanwhile Microsoft Graph itself is being updated to perform better and, like Delve, show up more personal and useful results. As such Graph and products based on it will now benefit from:
- New insights come from Office 365 Groups and Outlook modern attachments – Microsoft Graph derives intelligence from things like who you work with, what departments your colleagues are from, what sites you work on, the content you share and have in common, and what sites the people around you are using. that which now also includes documents from Office 365 Groups, modern attachments from Outlook, and more. There is business value in all transactions. The breadth of content plays an important role, not only to surface important people and content, it, too, enables a more personalized, relevant experience based on these added signals of content and people interactions.
- Improved performance and content freshness—In addition to relevance improvements, Microsoft Graph results are returned faster with improved success rates and content freshness (the time it takes for new content to appear within results). Relevance context is now pre-processed and sent along with the query on the search index. All the while maintaining admin and users requirement and expectation of the highest level of data security and privacy.
The first wave of updates, for Delve, will go out next week to First Release customers, while further expansion will continue in the coming weeks and months. Microsoft says a worldwide rollout for all Office 365 customers is scheduled for the summer.
The Office team is also looking to bring these improvements to intelligent search to other Office 365 apps including Sharepoint, OneDrive for business and more. The team is currently looking for feedback on these plans on its UserVoice page.
Source: Office Delve Blog