Corey Roth [MVP]

Updated: January 9th, 2015

You might have heard today that the new Boards (aka Pinterest) feature for Office Delve was released to First Release customers of Office 365.  I was lucky enough to have it show up already in a few of my tenants, so I thought I would share my initial experience. 

When you open Delve now, you’ll notice a new icon that says Add to board. 

Clicking on the icon will allow you to type the name of a new board or select an existing one. 

Once you have tagged your document, it will show underneath the document for all users.  Items tagged to boards are visible to all users.  However, the results are still security trimmed like everything else.  That means if Sara pins something to Acquisitions, but Alex doesn’t have permission to it, Alex won’t see it.

Clicking on the tag will take you a page with other items tagged.  When you first visit any board’s page, you will automatically be “following” it.  I suspect this makes the board show up in your list of boards in the navigation of Office Delve. 

When you click the Send a link button, it will open your mail client with a link to the board’s page in Delve.

If you look at the URL, you will notice a new query string parameter, b, with the board’s name.

Items can also belong to multiple boards.

After we have added some items to boards, here is what a typical page might look like.

You can remove an item from a board by right-clicking on the tag and choosing Remove from boards.

New features tend to roll out over time in First Release, so one feature that is notably missing is the list of boards I am following.  It should be above the People list.  I suspect this will show up soon, and I’ll update my post with details when it arrives.

My understanding is that your list of boards updates every two hours or so.  After checking Delve later, the list of boards I am following now shows up.  If you unfollow a board, it will still show in this list until the cache clears.  If you create a new board, it won’t show up in this list until then either.

The concept of removing and managing boards has been a hot topic on Yammer this week.  If you are interested in the topic be sure and follow this thread.

Delve Boards are an interesting new way of tagging documents.  It lets users organize things in logical buckets that make sense to them.  Now you might be wondering if this ties into anything like Managed Metadata Enterprise Keywords and unfortunately the answer is no.  The new system is disconnected from that.  I think users will like it though.  As an administrator though, it might be a while before you can do any maintenance of the boards.  I don’t think you need to worry about that too much though yet.  The whole purpose of this is that the tagging is end user driven and easy for the users.