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Microsoft to Retire Delve in December 2024
Posted on December 14, 2023, message center notification MC698136 announces the sad news that Microsoft will retire the Delve web app (“Office Delve” was the original name) from Microsoft 365 on December 16, 2024. The demise of Delve (Figure 1) isn’t altogether surprising because the app never achieved much traction.
Launched as codename “Oslo” at the SharePoint 2014 conference, Delve was the first of a planned set of Office 365 next generation portals. In the case of Delve, Microsoft said that it would “reimagine search.” While this mightn’t have happened, Delve introduced some interesting and worthwhile functionality. It was the first app to exploit the power of the Office Graph (now the Microsoft 365 Graph) to calculate and expose relationships between people and their work.
Delve Exposed Documents
When Delve used the Graph to calculate popular documents and display that information users, it caused n uproar in some quarters because people saw information that they shouldn’t. The problem wasn’t due to Delve. Instead, it happened because of inconsistent, inaccurate, or missing permissions on SharePoint Online sites that allowed the software to find interesting documents. The same issue might recur with Microsoft 365 Copilot with the big difference that documents accessible to Copilot can be used to generate text. There’s quite a difference between suggesting documents to users and ingesting documents to create new content,
On a more positive note, Delve allowed users to edit their profile and update their photo at a time when that experience was dreadfully fragmented across Exchange, Lync, and SharePoint. Microsoft is only now moving to an Entra-ID based solution that they hope will deliver consistent user photos across Microsoft 365. And Delve introduced a way for users to highlight documents by pinning them to boards. Overall, Delve seemed important enough to warrant a dedicated chapter in the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook over several editions.
Chipping Away at Delve Functionality
Time moves on and technology evolves. Delve’s problem was that it didn’t evolve quickly enough (or at all). Some of its functionality, like blog publishing, vanished in 2020 followed by its desktop app (killed in March 2021). Delve Analytics (always more of an add-on rather than an integrated component) broke away to become MyAnalytics (now exposed through the Viva Insights app and add-in). Microsoft’s attention turned elsewhere, and Delve didn’t occupy a compelling and important role in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, and that’s what brings us to its demise in 2024.
No Replacement for Delve Features
Microsoft doesn’t think that there is a need to replace the functionality currently available in Delve. To help users manage their profiles, Microsoft says that they plan to deliver a new edit profile capability in mid-2024 that is “tightly coupled with profile cards.” I’m unsure why they feel the need to assert the closeness of the connection given the pervasiveness of the user profile card across Microsoft 365 apps. A replacement for the Delve organization view is available in the user profile card and the Org Explorer (with the necessary licenses). Unsurprisingly given the sad lack of development since 2015, there’s no replacement for Delve Boards.
Lack of Functionality and Development
Even though I never had much use for Delve, I think Microsoft got some value from the app. We didn’t know much about the Graph in 2014-15. An app had to demonstrate what Microsoft meant by reimagining the way people searched for information together with the value of discovering information that could be useful to a person by reference to the connections that exist between that person and others within an organization. Delve did both, but I guess its flaw was that there wasn’t much else that users could do aside from pinning documents to boards.
It seems like Microsoft lost interest in Delve some years back. For whatever reason, it’s going to join other apps like StaffHub, Cortana Scheduler, Kaizala, and Sway in the Microsoft 365 wastebasket. All had some interesting aspects, but all eventually failed to appeal to the masses.
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