Since the release of Office Delve we’ve been researching at Mavention the possible applications for Office Graph – the engine powering Office Delve that captures activity in Office 365 and offers new ways of discovering relevant content. Even though it is only a preview release it already gives a good impression of its capabilities and possible scenarios.
Although currently the Office Graph API is exposed through search and can be combined with traditional search queries it discovers relevant content in a slightly different way than regular search queries. If you’re new to Office Graph it might take a moment for you to get used to how Graph Queries work, but once you get a grasp of it, you will see possible applications for Office Graph all around you.
Recently Jeremy Thake, Senior Product Marketing Manager in the Office Team and Microsoft interviewed me for the Office 365 Developer Podcast about Office Delve and building solutions with Office Graph. During the podcast we talked about how Office Graph is powering Office Delve and how it can be used for building custom solutions. Following are some of the ideas that I mentioned during the interview. Some of them are already shipped and some we will be releasing shortly.
Important: the current version of the Office Graph API is a pre-release. It is offered as-is and currently Microsoft offers no support for solutions leveraging it. Also should you choose to invest in a solution using Office Graph keep in mind that you will have to update your solution once the Office Graph API is officially released.
Office Graph Query Tester
One of the first things that we did when we started working with Office Graph was to build a utility that would help us try different queries. Office Graph Query Tester is an App for SharePoint that uses the Delve-like user experience to present Graph Query results as document cards. Instead of prefixed boards however it has a textarea where we can type Graph Queries. To make it easier for ourselves we included a couple of predefined queries that we can use as a starting point for building new queries.
We are finalizing the first release of Mavention Office Graph Query Tester and you an expect to see it in the Office Store shortly.
Mavention Document Miner
Mavention Document Miner is a free Windows Phone app that allows you to quickly find documents whenever you are on the go. It offers access to the standard Delve queries as well as a regular search functionality. In the latest release we added two new queries (Viewed by me and Trending around me in sites I follow) as well as the ability to choose which boards you want to use in the app.
Because Mavention Document Miner is a native Windows Phone it works faster than the current Delve Web experience.
Mavention Document Miner is available in the Windows Phone Marketplace.
Mavention Documents I Viewed
Mavention Documents I Viewed is a free App for SharePoint that shows you an always up-to-date overview of the documents stored in Office 365 that you have recently viewed. This makes it very easy for you to get back to any document that you have recently viewed.
Install Mavention Documents I Viewed from the Office Store
Mavention Popular Documents
Mavention Popular Documents is a free App for SharePoint that shows you documents relevant for you – just as Delve does on the Home board. What distinguishes Mavention Popular Documents from Delve is that the cards representing documents that you have already read are greyed out so that you can easily keep track which documents you have already seen and which are new.
Install Mavention Popular Documents from the Office Store
Mavention Trending Around Me In Sites I Follow
Mavention Trending Around Me In Sites I Follow is an App for SharePoint that we are currently finalizing and which we will be releasing in a few days. It allows you to easily see which documents are relevant to you and stored in the sites you follow.
This app is a great addition to how you find and keep track of relevant content. Combined with the standard Delve Home query it allows you to narrow down relevant content to the sites that you follow.
Stay tuned for the updates about the release of this app.
Mavention User Profile
Mavention User Profile is an App for SharePoint that we are currently using internally and which offers an alternative view into a profile of the particular user. The goal of this app was to present users with a visually appealing presentation of information about the specific person rather than the standard experience offered with SharePoint. A piece of the profile is the information about other people the particular person is working with and documents trending around that person – both of which are retrieved from Office Graph.
Summary
Those are just a few ideas that we are currently working on and we have a few more ideas scheduled for a release in the near future. Hopefully our solutions inspired you to start working with Office Graph yourself. When you do however please take into account that the current version of Office Graph is just a pre-release and things will change in the future. Stay tuned for more updates on Office Graph and how we use it to build custom solutions.
Originally posted at http://blog.mastykarz.nl/building-solutions-office-graph/