Microsoft releases Delve after six months incubation in Office 365 First Release program

I am so happy to see that Microsoft made a big thing about Office Delve at their Convergence event in Atlanta today. The only thing is that this news has been coming for a very long time.

On September 11, I wrote about the initial announcement and discussed how Delve was intended to help users find information that they had access to but might have lost in the information silos that affect so many businesses.

On October 30, I discussed how Delve explored connections between different Office repositories and wondered if one day public folders would be among those connections.

On January 15, I looked at the new Boards feature and commented that it would be nice if some administrative control had been included.

On February 10, I described how Delve explored contents of Exchange email attachments and surfaced that information along with other items taken from SharePoint and OneDrive.

It's nice to see everything come together and have Delve become generally available across Office 365 enterprise (including academic and government) tenants. It's really nice technology and I like using it very much.

In these days of fast-paced software releases, six months is a long time to have a feature in First Release (beta) status. We've seen a lot of good change occur in Delve in that time. Try it. I think you'll like Delve.

An on-premises version of Delve is not available. It's unlikely that similar functionality will become available in the foreseeable future – at least until Microsoft discovers how to ship all the interconnections that make Delve work in a form that can be deployed and managed by on-premises administrators.

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