Courtesy of Benjamin Niaulin at ShareGate
Well it’s happening, transformation. We’ve been used to looking at new versions with new gadgets of our products, but now we’re looking at a whole new suite called Office 365. And right now, they’re showing us that they aren’t just adding new gadgets, but looking at the problem from a new angle.
The Office 365 team had announced a new blogging feature for a while through Delve and it’s finally starting to arrive to us, customers. It’s important to understand how this new experience works, because it’ll be a very similar concept in team when Articles and Microsites start showing up as well.
Office 365 is introducing new knowledge management experiences
Quickly, more and more value is building up in our Office 365 tenants. What used to be a simple hosting of three different products (Exchange, SharePoint, Skype for Business – formerly Lync) is now growing into more, offering productivity enhancing experiences for users.
Alright I know, it sounds like I copy pasted that line from Microsoft’s marketing material. But the point is, they’re making changes and finally having these products work together to provide us with ready to use experiences or solutions in our organization.
Recently, the Office 365 team has decided to look at the Knowledge Management needs of organizations and set on a course to provide a new solution. In a previous post, I go on about how Office 365 is redefining Knowledge Management with newly announced Delve Boards, Story Pages (Blog), Articles, Microsites and the new Knowledge Management Portal.
In the article, I mention what each of those are, and how they’ll work at a high level. And this further maintains my reflections from Ignite: Collaboration in a Modern Workplace Transformed.
But now that the new Blogging feature or “Story Pages” (I’m still not sure how to call this) has started to roll out to tenants, it’s time to take a closer look at it.
If you want to keep note of some of the details, I recorded a short video that’s under 13min:
*Note: Images are not uploaded to your OneDrive for Business, see below for details.
An overview of the new Office 365 Blog in Delve
Friction-less user experience that also works on mobile devices and is always available, regardless of where you are.
No matter the customer; I’ve always seen a need that could be met with a blog. In many cases, it’s been from the CEO or the executive team that wanted to share thoughts with the organization.
Sometimes, it’s IT sharing tips and guides on how to use some of the deployed technology. And other times, it’s anyone sharing their expertise or simply putting down their thoughts to find it later on. It’s not just about a top down flow of information anymore, but allowing anyone to share and anyone to consume. But more importantly, for that knowledge to always stay and be both available and discoverable.
The new Office 365 Delve Blog feature doesn’t replace the old SharePoint Blog, if for some unfortunate reason you’re using those. In fact, the SharePoint Blog is the perfect example of why we can’t wait for the three-year cycle anymore. Every time the SharePoint Blog would be released, it would already be 2 years behind.
Office 365 has re-introduced the blog in a completely new perspective and just like the rest of Delve, it’s responsive and easy to use.
You’ll find it in your “About Me” by clicking on your name or by navigating to Delve from the App Launcher, clicking on “Me” and then selecting your Profile.
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From there, you’ll either be able to view all of your previously created posts or start writing a new one directly. Let’s look at all our posts.
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If you’re on your profile, you’ll see the New Post tile as well as all unpublished, drafts and published posts. And obviously, if you visit someone else’s list of Office 365 Delve Blogs you’ll only see the published posts.
Jim Ehrenberg (SharePoint Pros, Inc.) 