A quick look at Boards in Office Delve

Posted Wednesday, January 7, 2015 12:01 PM by CoreyRoth

Updated: January 9th, 2015

You might have heard today that the new Boards (aka Pinterest) feature for Office Delve was released to First Release customers of Office 365.  I was lucky enough to have it show up already in a few of my tenants, so I thought I would share my initial experience. 

When you open Delve now, you’ll notice a new icon that says Add to board

DelvreBoardNoTag

Clicking on the icon will allow you to type the name of a new board or select an existing one. 

DelveBoardNewBoardName

Once you have tagged your document, it will show underneath the document for all users.  Items tagged to boards are visible to all users.  However, the results are still security trimmed like everything else.  That means if Sara pins something to Acquisitions, but Alex doesn’t have permission to it, Alex won’t see it.

DelveBoardItemTagged

Clicking on the tag will take you a page with other items tagged.  When you first visit any board’s page, you will automatically be “following” it.  I suspect this makes the board show up in your list of boards in the navigation of Office Delve. 

DelveBoardPage1

When you click the Send a link button, it will open your mail client with a link to the board’s page in Delve.

 DelveBoardSendEmail

If you look at the URL, you will notice a new query string parameter, b, with the board’s name.

DelveBoardUrl

Items can also belong to multiple boards.

DelveBoardMultipleTags

After we have added some items to boards, here is what a typical page might look like.

DelveBoardHome

You can remove an item from a board by right-clicking on the tag and choosing Remove from boards.

DelveBoardRemoveTag

New features tend to roll out over time in First Release, so one feature that is notably missing is the list of boards I am following.  It should be above the People list.  I suspect this will show up soon, and I’ll update my post with details when it arrives.

DelveBoardNoList

My understanding is that your list of boards updates every two hours or so.  After checking Delve later, the list of boards I am following now shows up.  If you unfollow a board, it will still show in this list until the cache clears.  If you create a new board, it won’t show up in this list until then either.

DelveBoardList

The concept of removing and managing boards has been a hot topic on Yammer this week.  If you are interested in the topic be sure and follow this thread.

Delve Boards are an interesting new way of tagging documents.  It lets users organize things in logical buckets that make sense to them.  Now you might be wondering if this ties into anything like Managed Metadata Enterprise Keywords and unfortunately the answer is no.  The new system is disconnected from that.  I think users will like it though.  As an administrator though, it might be a while before you can do any maintenance of the boards.  I don’t think you need to worry about that too much though yet.  The whole purpose of this is that the tagging is end user driven and easy for the users.

Comments

# SharePoint 2013: Recopilatorio de enlaces interesantes (LXI)!

Sunday, February 1, 2015 3:25 AM by Blog de Juan Carlos González en Geeks.MS

Un mes más, en este post os dejo un nuevo recopilatorio de recursos y enlaces interesantes sobre plataformas

# re: A quick look at Boards in Office Delve

Wednesday, August 19, 2015 4:28 AM by Maisuria

Great write up Corey! Looking to bring Delve to our office... Do you know how I can delete board names with nothing in them?

# re: A quick look at Boards in Office Delve

Monday, August 24, 2015 9:36 AM by CoreyRoth

You can't delete boards right now unfortunately. :(

# re: A quick look at Boards in Office Delve

Thursday, November 9, 2017 6:44 AM by MNunez

Do boards affect search? E.g. do they show up as refiners?

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