Leveraging Office Graph to Improve Productivity

In a blog post on the Beezy website this morning, my product lead, Maximo Castagno, explained our latest development activity involving tighter integration with the Office Graph within the Beezy solution for SharePoint and Office 365. For customers using SharePoint Online, or with a hybrid SharePoint deployment, you’ll be able to take advantage of these new capabilities within our v3 product. You can also read the press release here.

The product team created a quick video outlining the capabilities which you can watch here:

 

As I wrote in an article for SPTechCon a couple weeks back, many of the productivity improvements we see out of Microsoft these days are not necessarily huge feature announcements or new products, but incremental improvements that improve common use cases. For example, I wrote:

I know we've all seen and are using this, but I still have to point to one of the greatest productivity improvements to e-mail in the past 20 years: integrating Skype for Business and OneNote into meeting invites. This is huge! As a remote worker in a company that is spread across Washington, California, Texas and Maryland, as well as Spain and the Netherlands, we rely on SharePoint, Skype and OneNote each and every day. When I create a meeting invite, it almost always includes a Skype link and related OneNote. And for those of us who live and breathe OneNote, you also have the ability to create Outlook appointments and meeting requests from within OneNote (even if Outlook is closed), create Outlook contacts, create and edit Outlook tasks, and insert meeting details into your notes. Talk about a productivity enhancement.

Some of the most powerful enhancements sometimes come in small doses. Much of the evolution underway within the Office productivity suite and even within Office 365 is a series of incremental improvements.

With these new Office Graph integrations, the Beezy solution adds incremental but powerful capabilities that not only make our solution more intelligent and personalized for end users, but we increase response rates and engagement – which are critical factors to think about and measure in the long-term success of SharePoint. As Maximo mentions, here is what we’ve built by using the Office Graph:

• Ultra-fast mentions: Every time a user add an @ mention, the system will suggest the names of the co-workers you interact with the most.
• Discovery cards: Within the stream of your activity feed, you will see recommendations for Communities to join based on your profile and activities, or People that you may be interested in following. Both recommendations are leveraging the “Working with…” API method of the Office Graph mixed with some business logic coming from Beezy.
• Questions routing: Users will see when a close colleague answers a question, and will then have the ability to post an answer. By routing this Q&A to other people with similar skills and network proximity to the first respondent, Beezy dramatically increases the quality of the overall answers.
• Recommended skills & expertise: When Beezy detects that one of your closest co-workers has updated their profile skills, it sends a suggestion to your feed and asks whether you would like to add this skill, as well. All of this is done in a visually compelling and non-intrusive UI.

Of course, there’s much more to come. But if you’ve not yet seen Beezy, you should definitely see a demo. Drop us a line at info@Beezy.net or fill out our contact form at Beezy.net