Office Delve, the answer to your unified search prayers

What is Office Delve?

The easiest way to explain Office Delve is to say it is a unified search center for Office 365, but in reality it is much more than that.  Delve is all about collaboration and it learns from your usage (and your organizations usage) to create a relevance hierarchy that works best for you. The more does in Delve, by viewing, editing and sharing each other's documents, the more useful Delve will be for all of you.  What you see in your views in Delve is different from what your colleagues see in theirs, because it is tailored specifically to you.

What does Delve look like?

One of the biggest advantages to Delve over traditional search is the user experience.  Delve is about allowing you to find what you are looking for and it is about making it easy for you to see the information.  Delve provides a user interface that is both intuitive and understandable for users.

Delve provides recent activity when you first load the browser and provides the ability to see, search, group and explore documentation, e-mails and content within your Office 365 ecosystem.

How can I and my team get the most out of Delve?

Remember Delve is adaptive, so the best way to get Delve working for you is by you working with Delve.  Delve doesn't modify access to anything, so you need to ensure that your documents are somewhere within the Office 365 ecosystem, like SharePoint online or One Drive for Business.  You also need to make sure documents you want to share are accessible to the people you intend to use them and finally, just like any search, you still need to concentrate on good metadata behind the scenes.  Delve is adaptive, but it can't read your mind, think of it as an extension of your standard search functionality, a good Information Architecture (IA) will make Delve work better, delve only makes the user experience (UX) portion easier to manage.

For additional information on getting the most out of Delve and making your documents accessible check out Microsoft Support article on it: http://devfac.to/1C7aByT

Update:

In an update this week (March 21, 2015), Delve has added additional content into the search results, you can now see Yammer and web search results in the result sets.  The web search results are based of what you and your coworkers have been navigating to.  It is quite nice to have it all consolidated.

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