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Microsoft Updates Profile Feature in Office Delve

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.

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