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Microsoft Office DELVE

Office Delve was launched last year (September 2014) and made available to office 365 users with no additional subscription fees, I and my colleagues were keenly following Microsoft’s approach from a development point of view and finally we have Delve extending itself to exchange email attachments as well, compared to earlier roll outs which only pulled data mostly from Microsoft apps like share point, One drive etc..

This post will give you a brief understanding about Delve and we’ll also share our findings and issues which we ran in to with Delve unleashing contents from exchange email attachments.* *

*What Is Delve  *

“DELVE” previously named “OSLO” is a tool which searches your emails, contact, documents and content stored in office 365 and then shows you what you need to see. Delve simply makes work much easier to navigate. DELVE is the perfect way to discover relevant information across your work in office 365. It uses artificial intelligence as called by Microsoft (technical term is “Machine Learning”) to get you what you need. It is similar to what “CORTANA” is to windows phone. That means with DELVE information comes to you against you finding information.

Simply put, You don’t have to go to each application (email, social networking apps, share point etc…) to find/search the stuff you need. You just need to seek help using “DELVE”

What Powers Delve

Delve is built on a search engine technology called OFFICE GRAPH, which most of us are familiar with.

Office Graph uses the machine learning techniques to map content, people and your activity on office 365 and presents it to Delve which publishes it.

Delve Presents this information in an impressive Card-based design which is not so difficult to comprehend and is easy to use, giving you the comfort of forgetting where you stored your information and from whom you got that content from.

And, of course it’s a permission based model, it only allows you to view content for which you have access/permissions to view.

Content Card-based design (search Results)

The search results in Delve show up as content cards in the “Home” View. In order to open the card you just need to click on the card to open the document.

In addition to this, there are many other ways you can use this card and make use of the information available on the content card.

The top most area is called the activity area which would indicate who modified the document or who emailed you the attachment (In case of an email attachment). At the bottom of the card you can also see the total number of views on that document or if that email message if part of a shared mailbox or a distribution list.

The Title of the card in case of a document is either the file name (only in case of a missing/empty title property) or the styles used in the word document, Title layout slide      if it’s a power point document and the workbook Title in case of excel sheets. There are many more combinations/permutation which decide the title, especially for documents, I’ve just mentioned few of them. In case of email attachments the title on the card is the file name of the document.

You can also use the mail icon to send the document as a link through email as well as control that who can see this document using the people icon.

NOTE:  these are just some of the features of this amazing contact card, exploring it and using all the available options should not be rocket science.

Now that we are somewhat familiar with the Delve, we know that it only and only pulls up data from Microsoft applications within office 365. As promised by Microsoft they’ve included many of the applications since delve was introduced to office 365 users and with keeping their promise, in similar lines they’ve now equipped Delve to unleash and pull out Exchange email attachments as a search result.

The latest version of the office 365 tenant gives you an option to participate in Microsoft’s First Release Program; you can see this option inside office 365 under new features which is often flashed by Microsoft a few weeks ahead of release.

Delve would easily find office documents (word, power point, excel) & PDFs that have been shared with you in an email.

Keeping aside the earlier features, now I would specifically talk about delve exploring the email attachments and share with you some of the shortcomings which were shared by my colleagues.

  • No Way to remove the search index: if you wish to delete an item which shows up on delve, it’s actually not possible to delete it right now within delve , you do not get the liberty of deleting that from the search index.
  • Only shows up attachments which you have received: Simply means, if you’re searching for an attachment which you’ve sent (sitting in your sent items folder) from your mailbox, it just doesn’t appear in the search result, it would only discover items which you’ve received and is sitting in your INBOX folder. Ideally it should be smart enough to find show all the possible attachments going out and coming in to my mailbox. Hope this works in the next release.
  • The TWO WEEK inaccurate window: Basically, Delve at this point in time is inaccurate with the attachment search and it also like it only pulls up attachments which have been sitting in your inbox for the last two weeks. In the test mailbox we used delve; it failed to pick up email attachments which were sent prior to two weeks back in time and at the same time it failed to pick up some of the attachments from the inbox… It is very much inconsistent with attachments as of now.
  • Out of date Indexing: The Delve indexing feature fails to track attachments or email items which were moved to a different folder, as discussed earlier this is in relation to delve finding attachments only from the Inbox folder. But if you click on the link on the contact card to take you to the message of the attachment it still fails, even if the content was moved to the Inbox folder from a different folder. So simply put… Delve gets confused when emails are moved from one folder to another.

These were some of the fallout identified by my team and we are still exploring it. Hope Microsoft comes up with a release which takes care of email attachments.

Although this software looks like it’s still in the development phase of its life cycle, hopefully there are better things to come from Microsoft with regards to Delve.

Microsoft also plans to eventually incorporate Delve with NON- MICROSOFT applications which should be wonderful.

NOTE: Microsoft says this feature is now available with all the Office 365 plans. (we’ve tried it on all the enterprise plans)

Only supports office 365 mailboxes no hybrid or on-premise support

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