Productivity Tools. Office Delve.
Not long ago we started to use some of the new office tools to help us improve our internal work productivity. Some of them are social, like Yammer, and today we would like to introduce you to “Office Delve”. Delve is more focused on content and Knowledge management.
To be honest, the tool has been available for a while as it was included as part of the enterprise toolset in Office 365, but it appeared to be in some way “hidden” for many eyes (including ours) and we did not take full advantage of its features. A few weeks ago our CEO told us (by means of a Yammer post) about his Delve “being empty”, and of course, that a good reason to dig deeper and discover Delve´s capabilities.
So what is Delve?
Delve is not a tool to create something, it is the place where we put together the relevant business content that we want to share across the enterprise with our colleagues. For instance, in Delve we can find shared work documents to emails, yammer posts and in general any kind of business content previously linked in both «Office 365» or in «OneDrive for Business» platforms.
Delve shows this information in the format of individual «cards» like Pinterest does. It results in a very easy and intuitive process. These cards can be grouped into “boards” to get the contents organized by whatever criteria we could need in a very simple way.
And… how does Delve know what it has to show?
The amount of content around us can become overwhelming. In order to identify in what we could be interested, Delve uses «Office Graph«, as the “mind” behind Delve that analyzes and selects those contents that we and our colleagues send to Office 365 (emails, documents, images, contacts, etc…). Moreover, Delve also includes a very powerful search engine that will help us to find whatever we are looking for (if they had not already been displayed on the home page).
How is Delve helping me?
Delve provides us fast access to those contents we are working in, even though we do not remember the document names, the email subject, etc. For instance, lets imagine that a colleague shares a OneNote notebook with us and that we start to work together on it, and after a while, we need again to access it but we have not linked it to our desktop OneNote. In such case, when opening Delve, we´ll see this document directly. Where we actually store it is something absolutely transparent for us. By simply clicking on it we will start to work immediately. If we do this whenever we work simultaneously with multiple colleagues or when managing a deep variety of content types, Delve can be the right tool to fix all the issues related to locating and accessing any content around us.
Who can see my documents?
Well, after working with Delve I’ve noticed that we were not really so much aware of Delve because I found public documents of some projects, some photos related to old events, but nothing sensitive that I should not see…so nobody has to be worried… The documents are not actually stored in a Delve repository. They are both in OneDrive or Office 365. So, if we save a document in our OneDrive public folder or in a public folder site inside Office 365, we have to understand that they are public and so, everyone would be able to access them. However, if those documents are properly organized in private folders with the corresponding file permissions applied, just those people we share those documents with, will be in fact able to see them.
Delve is the kind of tools that gets us a bit confused, maybe because we have been using local folders and files, sharing them through email or by using network shares. All these new Business productivity tools together with the modern sharing and communication mechanisms are getting more and more important in our daily work and it is time to change our own way of doing by evolving together with the new changes and the innovation wave we are all seeing. It is in fact being driven by our own sector. We are living the digital transformation and furthermore we work in a sector that makes it easier for us to understand all those new trends. We are selling them to our customers, so, why don’t start by using them by ourselves?
Is «Delve» helping us to increase our productivity?
Anyone will have to find their own answer because, as any change in the way of doing, it is deeply linked to the implementation and the way we effectively use those tools. It would be clearly useless to expect any improvement in my own productivity if for instance I (and all my colleagues) don´t share anything through Office 365 nor One Drive.
Should we give Delve a chance by working with those new Business tools that Office 365 is bringing us?
Let´s start here:
Some interesting links:
How to use content cards in Delve: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/How-to-use-the-content-cards-in-Office-Delve-e6157225-0e40-441c-906f-0c82bfee55f3
What Office Delve is? https://support.office.com/en-us/article/%C2%BFQu%C3%A9-es-Office-Delve-1315665a-c6af-4409-a28d-49f8916878ca
You also can see about Delve in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCbyer0Xupg
Eduardo Marcos Gutiérrez
Productivity Architect
