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Delve seems to get a lot of buzz, but there are still many I hear who say… I checked it out, but I still don’t use it.  Delve is one of those tools that many users simply won’t understand until they start making it part of their entrance into Office 365.  My recommendation is to make Delve your start screen in Office 365.  That’s the only way to get the necessary usage to get real adoption and users will see the power of it.  I think it takes looking at Delve about 5 times, to see the power of it.  Often it is NOT the first time you see it.  It takes time and it’s not going to be relevant and interesting every time.  It won’t get adoption in many companies because their users won’t give it the opportunity to provide the insights into what’s happening and to allow it to discover what’s relevant.  People use what they are use to, so it may simply take a few years for users to get use to the idea and need to hear it again and again for some time.  Microsoft doesn’t seem to be backing down as more and more features are added.

Go to the image of a “gear” and choose “Office 365 settings” then set your start page as “Delve”

Not yet convinced?  I really do think you should have this be default for all users.  Was hoping to find a way to set this via powershell or something in Admin UI, but no luck.  Looks like others have asked for this capability as well.

Not yet seeing Delve.  It may need to be enabled.

Enabling or Disabling Delve for your organization

1. Go to the SharePoint admin center.
2. Choose Settings.
3. Under Office graph, select one of the following:
   • Allow access to the Office graph
   • Don’t allow access to the Office graph

After that each user has the ability to opt out from Delve. In Delve settings it can be turned on or turned off.  The only other setting is for help tips.

I had an impromptu session at this past SharePoint Saturday Utah.  The session was on Delve and I was handed a deck from the brilliant Naomi Moneypenny.   I was doing a tag team job with David Leveille and he took the first shift while I caught up with Noah.  After a good thirty minutes I went back into the session and the first question from the audience was… “I still don’t get it.”

Amazing.  After 30 minutes, the audience still had lots of questions, not about the features, but about why!  Why was this built.  They were trying to understand when it should be used and really dig into the use cases.

Here’s what I said…

What is it about? Discovery.  It’s all about discovering what you don’t know, but that maybe you should know. 

That wasn’t enough.  They still didn’t know when a user would use this.

Well, let’s try an analogy.  Remember Outlook Today?  This is Outlook today in the ways that it was designed to help you get a quick glance on what’s going on, but in Outlook you’ve got structured data with Tasks, Messages, and Calendar items.  Delve takes unstructured data that come from any number of different sources that could be documents, conversations (coming soon), along with third party.

There are lots of articles that describe the features of Delve, and the power is really under the hood.  In imagining how this becomes valuable you have to understand the algorithm.

http://blogs.perficient.com/microsoft/2014/09/everything-you-need-to-know-about-delve/

The algorithm looks at a number of factors:

1. What’s New – recent documents created by your colleagues

2. Popular/Views by people close to you – popular items that are being viewed by colleagues

3. Email attachments – Items that can otherwise be buried in email

3. Overall – Delve will show items that are of interest to you based on insights it has gathered and analyzed in the Office Graph database.

4. Signals from Exchange Online currently are used to determine who you care about.

5. Yammer conversations coming soon

6. On premise and Third party signals – Planned.  Lots more to be announced at Ignite…

In many ways Delve introduces the power of machine intelligence into our everyday lives.  It starts here.  We allow a machine access to our data across many systems and say.  Use big data and your knowledge of what I care about and tell me what I should be looking at.  The concept is pretty awesome.  We just need some time for the trust to sink in, and idea of a computer learning enough about us that it can be smart about what it starts recommending.  The more it learns, the better the algorithm gets, the better access to data that matters, and pretty soon this Artificial Intelligence becomes irreplaceable.

#1 Business Concern with Delve: Security/Privacy…  It exposes items and documents that can’t be removed in the Delve interface, but permissions can be viewed and changed in the source system like OneDrive or SharePoint by someone with permissions.  Microsoft has done a few things to make it easier to get at permissions.  You’ll notice a few things in the UI.  One is the person icon which if you mouse over will say “who can see this?”

Here are some additional articles for ramping up on Delve

What is Office Delve?

Are my documents safe in Office Delve?

What kind of information will I find in Office Delve?

Users are concerned that private or sensitive documents are available in Delve

Other community folks thoughts on Delve