Atlanta – Just as you can scroll through your news feed on Facebook to find out what’s new with your friends, you can now scroll through a news feed within Office 365 to find out what’s new with your work documents.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made the direct comparison to Facebook when announcing the public availability of Office Delve today, at Microsoft’s Convergence conference. Showing off his own dashboard that he uses to track Microsoft’s activities, Nadella said he relies on it daily.
“It’s this service that takes all of the work inside of the organization and bring it to life,” Nadella says. “Think of it as your work news feed.”
Delve represents documents and videos that you work on as content cards. The card displays the last person to interact with a document and make changes, the title of the document, a picture, and a link to the storage location of the document. Documents that have been shared with you via email will also appear, the cards representing these documents having a paperclip icon.
When you share documents for collaboration with your colleagues, send them attachments via email, or add items to a folder you share with them on OneDrive, that’s when items will be surfaced in Delve’s news feed. Delve also has the ability to learn about what type of documents are important to you, showing you that content more often.
“The system knows what is most topical and relevant thing for me today,” Nadella says. “Everyone can discover information without having the hierarchy of the organization getting in the way.”
Delve makes decisions on what to show in your news feed based on who you often work with, how many of your colleagues are doing certain activities, and documents that you have been editing often yourself recently.
You can also share content with your other colleagues from your Delve view. Cards can be added to “boards” which are shared among a group of employees, containing documents related to a specific topic or project.
Much like Facebook, there’s also pages dedicated to people’s activities. So you can click on your colleague’s name and picture to see what they’ve been up to lately. But don’t expect to find selfies here – it’ll be a list of documents that person has shared and has been working on lately.
Microsoft points out in its documentation that Delve won’t automatically share content with any of your colleagues that wouldn’t normally be seen. If you haven’t sent a document to your colleague or invited them to collaborate on it, they won’t see it.
Nadella announced the global release of Delve to all Office 365 customers on Monday.