September 2014 - Posts

Have you checked out one of the YamJams yet on the Office 365 Technical Network?  I’ve participated in the last few around new features in Office 365.  I found that I have been able to learn a lot about the topic at hand directly from Microsoft product team members.

On September 10th, they had the Delve YamJam.  Here I was able to learn more about the new feature.  What excited me is that I was able to get some of my developer specific questions answered.  They did an excellent job.

On September 29th, they had a YamJam about the new Office 365 groups feature.  Members of the product team went into the details of how the underlying features were implemented using hidden site collections in SharePoint Online.

Next up is the Driving Adoption YamJam coming up on 10/1 at 9:00 am PDT.

Did you miss a YamJam?  Don’t worry the content is still there even after it occurs.  They even write up a summary post a few days later with the key takeaways.  Here’s an example from the Delve YamJam

If you are not a member of the Office 365 Technical Network on Yammer be sure and join.  It’s a great place to ask questions.

You might have heard the news that Microsoft is rolling out Delve to Office 365 starting today.  I was lucky enough to get it pushed to my demo site so I wanted to share some details.

When Delve is activated on your tenant, you will see a link in your suite bar.

DelveSuiteBar

Click the link to get started.  Your first time, you will see an intro screen, telling you a little bit more. 

DelveStart

By default, you are going to get an empty screen unless you have some content shared with you.  You won’t see the full power of Delve until you have a sufficiently active SharePoint tenant.

DelveStart2

However, if you have some content loaded, you can start to see it in action when you click on My Work.

DelveMyWork2

Here you will find documents relevant to you because you have modified them. 

You can easily do keyword searches with Delve and get a nice visual display of the results.

DelveSearchResults

Delve can figure out people that are relevant to you and you will see them listed in the navigation.  Click on the link and it will show you the documents that they have worked on.  Remember, you only see documents that you have permission to view.

DelvePeopleResults

Delve has a small settings menu which you can access in the top right corner of the Suite Bar.

DelveSettingsMenu

It takes you to a settings page where you can disable Delve.

DelveSettings

For those curious about where Delve lives, it’s hosted by the My Site (Personal Site) collection on a page named me.aspx.

You can see some of the URLs below.

Delve Home Page URL example (v=home):

DelveHomeUrl

Delve Search URL example (q parameter):

DelveSearchUrl

Delve People Results URL example (p parameter):

DelvePeopleResultsUrl

Delve My Work URL example (v=mywork)

DelveMyWorkUrl

I have noticed that the pictures of people aren’t loading correctly on my tenant.  I don’t know if that is a Delve issue or something else.

If you are wanting to check out Delve, be sure and read Office Delve for Office 365 admins.  You’ll need to turn on the First Release program in your Office 365 Service Settings.

DelveFirstRelease

You’ll need to enable Delve on the SharePoint Settings as well.  Choose the option Allow access to the Office Graph (default).

DelveOfficeGraphEnabled

If you don’t have Delve yet, check those settings in the post above and then be patient.  You should have Delve soon once you make those changes.