If you were at the SharePoint Conference in March 2014, there were some big vision announcements made - http://blogs.office.com/2014/03/03/work-like-a-network-enterprise-social-and-the-future-of-work/. Mostly notably in the area of Enterprise Social. Microsoft is taking many of the solutions that were very successful with Yammer and adopting these solutions into Office 365. This resulted in:
- Office Graph – This is fabric inside of Office 365 that can look at email, conversations, documents, sites, instant messages, posts, etc. and evaluate your relationship with people and things. This is then used as an engine to provide collaborative and social end user experiences.
- Delve – Formerly codename Oslo, is a new app and user experience built on top of Office Graph which delivers a personalized (and security trimmed) connecting a person to business data across the enterprise based on interaction, communications and collaboration with other people. If you want to learn more about it – go here - http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/business/what-is-delve-FX104369201.aspx.
- Groups for Office 365 – This is a really cool new feature that allows users to quickly and easily create a group. In that group there is a shared calendar, shared mail, shared conversation, shared documents, etc. The beautiful thing about this is that the end user experience is consolidated such that Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Office Online experience all in one. The user does not need to bounce around to differ applications, it is just a simple end user experience. No more having to independently create a team site, shared calendar, shared mailbox, etc. I feel I am doing an injustice to this new feature because it is so cool and I do not have a lot of time to write about it. If you want to learn more about it, please go here - https://support.office.com/en-US/Article/Find-help-about-groups-in-Office-365-7a9b321f-b76a-4d53-b98b-a2b0b7946de1.
The reason why I writing this blog is that both Delve and Groups have reach major milestones in Sept 2014 and are now being released into the Office 365 for customers to start using. For more information:
- Delve – milestone release announcement - http://blogs.office.com/2014/09/08/milestone-office-delve/
- Groups for Office 365 – milestone release announcement - http://blogs.office.com/2014/09/25/delivering-first-chapter-groups-office-365/