News
        
        Microsoft Updates Profile Feature in Office Delve
        
        
        
			- By Kurt Mackie
 - February 16, 2016
 
		
        Microsoft on Tuesday announced improvements to the user profile feature in Delve, the discovery and social networking solution that's included in Office 365.
According to Microsoft's announcement, the improved profile now shows a user's contact information,  photo   and recent activities. It also shows shared documents plus the people   the  user works with in an organization.
The updated  profile feature will gradually reach Office  365   subscribers. It'll be available to "first release" testers "over  the   next several weeks." The general rollout is expected by Q2 of this    year. 
Microsoft issues updates to Office 365 solutions via a  continual update  process.   Organizations get the updates monthly (current channel) or once  every   four months (deferred channel), while first-release users serve as an    early beta-test group.
Delve (formerly code-named "Oslo") is Microsoft's  newest addition to   the Office 365 family of productivity apps. It's based on an    underlying Office Graph technology that uses Microsoft's FAST enterprise   search  technology to surface organizational information, such as   descriptions about people,  documents and associations. Delve shows   information based on the permissions  that have been set up by an IT   department. It has a machine learning capability  to bring the   information together, which gets presented to the user in a card-like    format. 
Microsoft first rolled out its Delve application in September  2014. Some features are still at the testing phase, like a "praise"  button that was added in October.
Delve comes with most business (E1 through E5), academic (A2  through   A4) and government (G1 through G4) Office 365 subscriber plans. It's    not available with consumer plans. Delve pulls backend information from   various  commercial Microsoft applications, including "SharePoint   Online, Exchange Online,  Skype for Business, OneDrive for Business, and   more," Microsoft's  announcement noted.
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
            
        
        
                
                    About the Author
                    
                
                    
                    Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.