I have been quite off-grid recently, but life goes on and as always, there are so many news about Office 365. Some of them are not related to search and findability at all (or at least, not directly), but some others are quite interesting.
In this post, I’ve collected the most important and (hopefully) exciting ones.
Cloud Hybrid Search
SharePoint 2016 IT Preview has been released in late August, and at the same time, the Cloud Hybrid Search Preview also became available for SharePoint Server 2016 and 2013. As we’ve seen in the recent years, cloud has become more and more popular, more and more businesses of all kinds, sizes and geographies moved more and more content and resources there. With the growing amount of content in the cloud, findability became more and more critical as well.
Until now, we’ve been having “semi-hybrid” Search solutions out-of-the-box. If we wanted to have a real, seamless experience, we needed to purchase third party tools. – But now, the real solution is here! Cloud hybrid search is available in SharePoint 2016, as well as in SharePoint 2013 as an update. With this solution, we’re able to send the content crawled on-premises to the cloud index, and not only to provide solid interleaved experience, but also to use the benefits of cloud – for example, Office Graph and Delve.
These new capabilities definitely will help up to have better findability without boundaries between on-prem and cloud, and to help our users achieving more.
New types of content in Delve
In the last few weeks, new types of content started to appear on Office Delve: SharePoint sites, OneNote, Visio files and images. Still more to come!
Praise and Like
As Microsoft says on the Office Blogs:
“With the new Praise feature in Delve, you are now able to send publicly viewable praise to your colleagues. In addition, an email is sent to their manager to make them aware of the individual’s efforts. The praise appears in Delve on the recipient’s profile, and colleagues can click Like to increase the recognition.”
I’m pretty confident, this feature will be very popular in each organization.
Favorites
Documents can be collected by adding them to the Favorites tab on the “Me” page of Delve. This is a nice addition to the existing Board features, which can be used to group and share related documents.
These updates and new features show clearly the direction Office Graph and Delve is going: the main goal is to improve productivity by helping discovery and findability of “content gems” in the organization. Cannot wait to see what’s next!
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