Boards a new way to organize and discover content in Office 365 Delve

Office 365 Delve helps users discover content that is relevant to users. A new feature that allows content surfaced in Delve to be easily organize introduced to Delve. This feature called Delve is being rolled out to Office 365 customers who have opted for the First Release option.

Users can create boards in Delve to group related documents together and share it with other users. For example a user can create a board that groups all documents that are related to a to a particular topic.

Creating a new board or adding a document to an existing board is pretty easy. Clicking the + button on any card that is shown in delve will show an input area to enter name of the new board along with the list of existing boards.

 

A document can be grouped under multiple Boards and the Board names are displayed on the delve card.

 

 Boards that a user has created and the boards that are shared with him are shown in the left navigation.

 

Clicking on the board name from the navigation or from the card takes user to the board page that list all the documents grouped under the board.

 

 

From the boards page users can easily Follow a board or share a board with other users.  Users can also search for boards from the Delve Search.

Delve Boards allow you to group related contents and return to them easily when It matters to you.  Watch this video to know more about Delve Boards.

 

 

 

Querying Office Graph in SharePoint Online using GQL

Microsoft started rolling out Delve was rolled out to Office 365 customers couple of weeks back. Delve is a new way to find relevant document, people and conversations around them instead of searching for them. Office graph is the technology that powers delve and developers can make use of Office Graph to build custom applications that extend Office 365.

Office Graph has information about people, documents and the relationship and interactions between them. In Office graph terms users who perform activities on documents are actors and the activity they perform is an action. The relationships and interactions are represented as edges and an activity performed by an actor will generate an edge.

Developers can query the Office Graph in SharePoint online through search REST API by passing GraphQuery property to search API. The Graph Query Language (GQL) has the syntax of
GraphQuery:actor(<ActorID>,[filter])

Where ActorID is the ID of the actor for which you want to retrieve activities and documents and filter is an optional argument of action types to filter the results based on activities performed. For example to query all modifications done by an actor with ActorID of 1009 the GQL would be

https://<SharePoint Online site>/_api/search/query/?QueryText=’*’&Properties=’GraphQuery:actor(1009\,action\:1003)’

https://slmfeo13052.sharepoint.com/_ api/search/query/?QueryText=’*’&Properties=’GraphQuery:actor(ME, action\:1003)’

Where 1003 is the action ID that represents modify action. Full list of action types can be seen from here. 

Results returned from GQL are similar to the results from SharePoint Search REST API except that and additional property called Edges will be included in the details.   Edges property will have details of action, date and ranking model weight. Following is an example of Edges property returned from a GQL Search REST API call
 <d:element m:type="SP.KeyValue">
<d:Key>Edges</d:Key>
<d:Value>[{"ActorId":29355180,"ObjectId":28029928,"Properties":{"Action":1001,"Blob":[],"BlobContent":"","ObjectSource":1,"Time":"2014-09-12T09:47:17.0000000Z","Weight":1}}]</d:Value>
<d:ValueType>Edm.String</d:ValueType>
</d:element>

Using GQL and the Edges property interesting application can be developed as shown by Richard’s MSDN blog .