Creating another Delve Clone–A real one this time!

Ok…..once again it’s Friday and that means my mind starts to spin. This time around a question about using Delve for external users from the Delve group of the Office 365 Yammer network.



The Delve application itself is not available for external users, but the signals from external users are. I have previously created a Delve clone using the Content Search Web Part, which also works for external users. It should be polished a bit though :)

Delve blog articles dissected

Kanwal Khipple had a question on the Office 365 Yammer network the other day about how can you surface Delve blog articles on a SharePoint site?

To figure out if it’s doable and how you need to understand how the Delve article solution is built. I won’t go into the actual digging, but rather lay out the building blocks from a technical perspective.
And if you want the short story, surfacing metadata other than Title and Author is not trivial – from a search perspective. Which is also what you see in a Delve card.

Hide content from Delve–but not from search

[Update 2015-05-01]
Microsoft have now updated the documentation at Manage the search schema in SharePoint Online, and you no longer have to create a managed property or map the crawled property to it. The only step you have to perform to hide data from Delve is to create a site column named HideFromDelve of type Yes/No, and start using it. Everything else is taken care of for you by Microsoft :)

Remember that this will only hide the content from the Delve application, not from the Office Graph and other apps built using it.

[Original Post]

I love Friday’s! Why? Because I get to spend time in the office not being out at a customer site. And when in the office, more often than not, conversations with my colleague Andreas Eide spawns an idea or a blog post. So here goes!

Andreas has this issue where he get’s a lot of invoices in his Delve board, which is not very interesting. They appear because people he collaborates with produce a lot of invoices. The first solution was to mark the invoice library not to be indexed. The drawback however is that this makes the invoices not discoverable at all via search, and you also have to exclude the full library, not just individual items or folders. So then what?

Read the official documentation

Creating a Delve clone using Content Search Web Part

While adding support for Office Graph queries in the SharePoint 2013 Query Tool I had to figure out how to send the query in as POST and not just GET. This led me into the Properties property of a search query. Basically a key value store which Microsoft can use to extend the search API’s over time without breaking anything. And this is what the Graph queries use.

There has been some great posts recently from Richard Dizerega, Elio Struyf and Waldek Mastykarz about the Office Graph. Both Richard and Waldek have used the REST API, while Elio did some nifty JavaScript in order to run queries. What’s missing in Elio’s approach is to get Graph data on the initial loading of results, as the web part will first perform a regular query before you can graph it up and re-trigger it. But, as long as you manage to encode it just right, it’s all about editing a web part definition in your favorite text editor.

See demo

Note: Using CSWP with the Office Graph has to be done in SPO, and is not available on-premises (except perhaps using hybrid which I haven't tested)

Office Graph support in the SharePoint 2013 Search Query Tool

I just compiled v2.2 of the SharePoint 2013 Search Query Tool which has one major new function: Support to query the Office Graph in Office365 using GQL (Graph Query Language). Many thanks to Barry Waldbaum @ Microsoft for starting the work on this feature, and the joint effort to bring it into the tool.