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The Importance of CodeName "Oslo" and Office Graph

By Agnes Molnar posted 03-27-2014 09:05

  

The SharePoint world's biggest conference, SharePoint Conference 2014 just finished a couple of weeks ago. During the conference, Microsoft made some major announcements - in this post I'd like to highlight one of them: Codename "Oslo" with Office Graph.


What is "Oslo"?
If I wanted to oversimplify it I would say Oslo is like a "Flipboard for business": it's a search-driven application that aggregates content from various locations in various views. It's based on Office Graph that intends to help finding the right information in the right context. Office Graph combines people, content and the ecosystem, based on the "signals" it collects.


How does Oslo work and why is it so revolutionary?
First of all, let's see how we work and discover content today:

  1. We know where it is.
  2. We know the logic, the algorithm how to navigate there.
  3. We can use Search.
  4. We can subscribe to Alerts or follow the content


Each of these ways is different and very useful in some particular scenarios. However, they have one thing in common: each of them is driven by us, the users. We know, we use, we subscribe, we follow. If we're not aware of the source of the content, we do not get notified about it. It's very simple.


Of course, we can "walk around" to look for new pieces of content. We can check if there's anything new created since our last visit, but this way is very time consuming, and it's impossible to crawl all the locations where potential "relevant" content can be born.
As a consequence of this approach, if others create any new repository, we have to get to notified about it; otherwise we're not aware of, therefore, totally miss the content stored there.

Obviously, nowadays Information Overload does not help with this at all.

This is where Oslo and Office Graph can come to the picture - instead of expecting you, the end user to pull the information out from the sources, it pushes the relevant content to you.
 

What is considered to be "relevant"?
Oslo has several views, each of them has a different sense of relevant content. As demonstrated at SPC, the most remarkable views are:

  • Presented to me
  • Modified by me
  • Liked by me
  • Shared with me
  • Trending around me
  • Viewed by me

There're some additional views that support to find the content by its contributors, or to find the right persons.


What's next?
Oslo and Offie Graph are still under development, Microsoft estimated the first public release for the second half of this year. Oslo will be available for Office 365 customers only, both as a rich client and with its Web UI in O365.



#informationmanagement #Search #Collaboration #informationarchitecture #ContentManagement
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