Introduction to Delve App of SharePoint Online

This is a beginner's article to explain the new Delve app on SharePoint Online provided by Microsoft. When you click on the Apps button in your SharePoint site you will see the logo for Delve. Delve is an app that lives in MySite.



Click on Delve, you will be taken to this new application. There are no menu items, just three links on the left hand side, Home, My Work and Shared with me and a Search Box on top.



So what does Delve provide us? Instead of finding the content we are working on, Delve does. We would normally sort by date descending and find what has recently changed or probably create an alert on the Document Library for any content added or modified. Delve finds the documents and content that have most recently been worked on or the content that we have been given rights to view. Delve never changes permissions. We and our colleagues only see documents that we already have access to.

Documents can be added to OneDrive and Shared or can be shared from the Document Library and permission on edit and view can be set when sharing as shown below.



In Delve you will see a Tile like rendering with a preview of the file.



As soon as you start typing in the Search box, the right hand page is refreshed.



There is no number of results or paging specified nor an option to sort. The URL shows it is in the _layouts/15 directory; that means this is an application page.



Application pages are not stored in the database. So they can't be accessed by SharePoint Designer. This app is at a very nascent stage; it needs a lot to be done to make it professional level. Probably in the next few updates much more is to come, much more is definitely.