Delve, Office Graph Must Transcend Office 365 To Be Revolutionary

In recent news, Microsoft has introduced Office Delve, their first application to utilize Microsoft’s Office Graph. Office graph is a tool that works to map the relationships between people and content. After doing some investigating on the Microsoft website I have come to the following conclusion. Essentially, Delve combines the social network aspect of LinkedIn; the news feed of Twitter, and all of the added capabilities of the Microsoft Office family.

For example, Delve realizes that you have a meeting tomorrow, it understands what the topic of the meeting is, and knows who is going to be there. Delve takes the liberty to gather relevant files, documents, and any other necessary information to the meeting. Said information can be obtained from attachments in your email, trending documents on the Delve cloud, or anything that you’ve liked, viewed, or been presented on Delve. Finally, Delve displays all of this on its dashboard, so you can be over prepared for the meeting, impress your boss, and perhaps earn a promotion.

Delves user interface is as seamless if not more seamless than those of Facebook and Twitter. It utilizes an intuitive “card” based interface, each card can contain a specific file, or piece of insight while also displaying comments, likes, views, and tags. This information is included to help users determine whether or not each item displayed is relevant to his work. If a card is significant to the user, if so the user has the ability to open the file, where he can edit and share the final copy with colleagues.

Some may argue that Salesforce combined with a respective company’s intranet makes such an application uncalled for. I would argue the opposite, that Delve, when finalized, could make both the previous obsolete. This is because with a millennial generation that is so accustomed to the social network of Facebook and the newsfeed of Twitter, Delves real time socio corporate experience prompts its users to be more efficient and prepared in the work place, making it much more attractive to my generation. Not to mention that this application is extremely usable on any smart phone.

This article captured my attention for a number of reasons. This past summer I interned for JPMorgan Chase & Co. and became extremely familiar with the capabilities of outlook, how they collaborate prior to and during meetings, and how their internal network works. Outlook received my emails and attachments, while at the same time kept a schedule of events that required my attendance. Meetings are usually scheduled this way; a vast chain email invitation (sometimes containing an attachment) goes out to everyone on a team and, if accepted, the event will appear on your calendar. The company’s intranet allowed me to view various pieces of insight, as well as search employees and identify their rung on the corporate ladder. If Delve is all that it is said to be, it will combine all the aspects of Salesforce, and intranet, while adding office capabilities, revolutionizing the way big companies such as JPMC handle their business, taking collaboration to a whole new level.

"Delve, Office Graph Must Transcend Office 365 To Be Revolutionary." CIO. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 Oct. 2015.