Leveraging Delve from the SharePoint People Search

Leveraging Delve from the SharePoint People Search header image

Yesterday a milestone for Office Delve has been announced and over the course of the next few months Delve will be deployed on all Office 365 tenants. So if you are not seeing it yet make sure you have the ‘first release’ option selected in the Admin panel of Office 365. Some more information on the Office 365 first release can be found on the Office 365 release programs. As the name indicates having that option selected helps you to get the new latest updates for Office 365 as early as possible.

If you already see Delve enabled on your tenant you can start using it right away and as you might have seen there are a few queries available as well as a user page. These user pages are accessible through the left menu that contains people you have been working with. A user page will show you an overview of information trending around that person. This view can be particularly interesting if you are trying to find out what a specific user is working on lately.

In order to integrate Delve more into the experience from Office 365 we decided that all the people search results from a default Search Center should no longer redirect to the person.aspx page but rather redirect to user page in Delve. So rather than redirecting to the PersonImmersive.aspx page that shows user information we decided to develop a display template that redirects to their Delve profile.

You can download the Mavention Delve Person DisplayTemplate and apply it to your people search results. It is a blank copy of the default Person display and only inserts the link to the Delve person page, it also keeps the link to a profile page of a user in case you do not need to open their Delve page.

If you now click the name of the user will redirect you to their profile page that will look something like the following:

Clicking the profile link will still redirect them to their default SharePoint profile page. Obviously you will need Delve enabled on your tenant in order for this display template to work properly. If Delve is not enabled on the tenant you are working on, you are most likely to hit the following access denied error stating that the page is not accessible, as the page is present though it is protected on your tenant.

Having this display template in place will drive more users to the Delve experience and helping them to find relevant content. By integrating the results provided from SharePoint, an interface most users are familiar with, and redirecting that to Delve users are easily triggered to work with and get used to the new interface provided by Delve.

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