Tracy van der Schyff

#Office365Challenge – Remember how you used to save everything on your desktop so you could find it faster? Please don’t. Office 365 brings you Delve, which kinda does all of this for you. Automatically. “With Delve, information finds you versus you having to find information.”

What is Office Delve?

Office Delve is a new way to discover relevant information and connections from across your work life. Delve displays information that is most relevant for each person based on the work they are doing and the people with whom they are engaging. With Delve, information finds you versus you having to find information.
All of this is presented in a beautiful, card-based design that is easy to understand and use. It also presents intuitive ways to view content, so you no longer have to remember where stuff is stored or who shared it with you. And, of course, Delve only enables you to view content you have access and permission to view—we always respect permissions across all parts of Office 365. – Julia White, general manager of Office 365 Technical Product Management

How do I access my Delve (profile) page?
Click on your profile pic (1), then on About Me (2):

Delve brings the following together to make your life easier:

• People you work with / Organization
• Your personal Profile
• Recent Documents
• What people around you are working on
• Your Blogs
• Favourites

1. Search – for documents etc, it will even return mails you’ve sent / received with attachments
2. Home – will show all the popular content in the company (based on permissions)
3. Me – this is your Profile page
4. Favourites – add documents to your favourites or create boards which group relevant content together
5. People – you work with
6. Edit Profile – this is where you’ll edit your profile – more on this below
7. Profile – information displayed from your profile
8. Recent Documents

More about your profile:
In your edit profile section you can populate content and change settings under the following tabs:

• Basic Information
• Contact Information
• Details
• Newsfeed Settings
• Language and Region

The fields I find adds a lot of value are “About Me” which is similar to a Bio, “Ask Me About”, “Past Projects”, “Skills” and “Interests”. Keep in mind that these are all searchable and in big corporations are great for finding resources for projects or people with similar interests as you.

Managing User Profiles:
Admins can manage which fields users are allowed to edit and even hide / add new fields. To edit profiles go to the App Launcher > Admin > SharePoint > User Profiles > Manage User Properties or Manage User Profiles. Under Manage User Properties you can setup the profile policies and find the internal names of the fields for mapping / search queries. Under Manage User Profiles you can edit profiles on behalf of the users.

“SharePoint Online (including Delve) and Office 365 AD service share some properties (not all), and changes to those properties of the AD profiles will automatically sync to the SharePoint Online profiles. However, the changes to the SharePoint Online profiles will not be synced back to Office 365 AD service, it is a one-way sync” Read more here.

For your convenience:
Attributes that are synced from the on-premises Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) to Windows Azure Active Directory (Windows Azure AD)
Synchronizing your directory with Office 365 is easy

Overview of my challenge: As an absolute lover of all things Microsoft, I’ve decided to undertake the challenge, of writing a blog every single day, for the next 365 days. Crazy, I know. And I’ll try my best, but if I cannot find something good to say about Office 365 and the Tools it includes for 365 days, I’m changing my profession. So let’s write this epic tale of “Around the Office in 365 Days”. My ode to Microsoft Office 365.

Keep in mind that these tips and tricks do not only apply to Office 365 – but where applicable, to the overall Microsoft Office Suite and SharePoint.