How Office 365 Delve Improves Company-Wide Search Functions

You have an hour before a team meeting and you’re scouring through your email, personal cloud storage, thumb drives and workstation to find your presentation files. Essential information gets scattered across a dozen locations and requires a data detective to hunt down, which robs you of valuable time you could be spending on high-priority tasks. Delve for Office 365 eliminates this frustrating situation. With organization-wide search functions designed to simplify search and content discovery, you can focus on doing your job rather than tracking down documents.

Simplify Data Searches With Office 365 Delve

Improved Search

Office 365 Delve search doesn’t limit itself to a single location, which is perfect for those times when you’re not entirely sure where you stored important information. You eliminate data silos that make it difficult for you to find critical data, as Delve looks through all OneDrive for Business and Office 365 Sites locations available in your organization.

This application attempts to predict the most relevant search results when you’re looking up documents. You have standard keyword search queries as well as the ability to search by document type. Advanced search features include exploring files recently shared with you or ones you viewed. All content found with Delve shows up on a content card, which clearly shows the document title, associated application, last modified date, creator, share buttons and views.

Content Discovery

You get a powerful search tool with these Delve features, but it excels the most in reducing your need to find documents. Its content discovery feature uses machine learning and Office Graph technology to mark valuable content. The application learns about your requirements by tracking organization-wide document trends, your personal file activity, your interactions with other Delve users and additional data points.

Delve uses this information to suggest relevant files directly. For example, if you frequently access accounting spreadsheets and presentations, Delve finds documents with similar characteristics that are frequently accessed by that department. It may discover recently edited expense reports and commonly referenced resources. You don’t have to wait around for someone to email you the document; plus, you benefit from only one version of the file receiving edits rather than sorting through five distinct versions.

Personalized Dashboard

The Delve dashboard provides a completely personalized experience when you log in. Your recently accessed, created and shared documents appear front and center so you can get to them right away. If you marked any documents or boards as your favorites, they will also appear in this section.

Every user has their own profile on Delve, which creates an enterprise social network for improved collaboration. When you visit a co-worker’s profile page, you see information such as their contact information and department. The content they’ve recently worked on or interacted with also displays on this page. Delve also shows you content that’s trending with the people you’re connected with. You see documents receiving a lot of edits or those frequently read by people around you. The Delve search functionality also allows you to search a particular user’s documents so you can find the files they mentioned in the meeting the other day.

Document Grouping

You work with a lot of related documents, and you want to view them all in one place. Delve offers document grouping via Boards, which offer a user-friendly grouping option. Each content card provides a Board field for easy tagging. You can create temporary boards for projects, resource boards for new hires and a personal board for documents you like to keep on hand. You can share favorite boards throughout the organization as well for cross-department collaboration.

Integration With Other Applications

Delve provides deep integration with other applications in the Office 365 for Business suite. It creates contextually relevant links from Outlook, Microsoft Office apps, SharePoint, Sites and OneDrive for Business to streamline your business processes. You don’t need to ask for the training team to send over a copy of their presentation you saw yesterday - Delve found it and put it on your personalized dashboard. This intelligent search software stops unnecessary back and forth emails looking for files, IT help desk requests when users can’t remember their document storage location and other wasted time.

Permissions Control and Security

You don’t need to worry about Delve surfacing unauthorized content for specific user groups. This application adheres to existing permissions established in the Office 365 environment. You won’t see documents outside of your permission group, so you don’t have to worry about stumbling into the wrong files accidentally. You also remain the only person with access to any private documents. Delve makes it easy to find these files, but your coworkers need the right permission before they see this data. Your private documents display with a padlock icon to indicate their status.

These features in Office 365 Delve change the way your organization searches by attempting to eliminate searching entirely. Its powerful machine learning and analytic capabilities show what you’re most likely looking for. You avoid crossing your fingers and hoping you find the right keyword and application combination for a file that refuses to be found. Delve empowers you to spend more productive time doing your job and collaborating with your co-workers for a more efficient workplace.

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