Office Graph, Is it your cup of tea? - Presentation from SPSOslo

Saturday October 17th 2015 sported the 3rd SharePoint Saturday in Oslo and probably the best so far. This time they had it in the fall instead of spring time, allowing more people to picking SPS over beautiful weather.

This time I did a business session about the Office Graph, and how it may, or may not help you be more productive on a day to day basis. I covered both your personal insights as well as organizational insights, discussing a bit what it will help you with, and what the future may bring.

If you want some narration with the slides or you are curious if you should or should not start using the Office Graph and Delve, feel free to ping me. –And I am a firm believer that the Office Graph is useful to everyone, but I think we’re still waiting for the killer application using it.

Office Graph - Is it your cup of tea?—Mikael Svenson

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 :)

Introducing the CollaboGraph by Puzzlepart

Took me long enough, but I finally put the winning entry from “Battle of the Graph @ Ignite 2015” out in the store for everyone on Office 365. And of course, it’s free!

Search for CollaboGraph in the SharePoint Store and you should be able to add it in seconds.

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.

How To: Query the Office Graph using CSOM

I’m in the process of adding GQL support to the SharePoint 2013 Search Query Tool together with Barry Waldbaum (Microsoft), and while writing the POST support I found it easier to test it using CSOM.

Below is sample code with inline comments if you want to go the CSOM route instead of using REST to query the Office graph. The key is to use the Properties property of the KeywordQuery object.

The benefit of using CSOM over REST in my opinion is that you can pass in more than one query per call, and thus optimize network traffic and wire chatter.