When Delve was released by Microsoft it was pretty groundbreaking in the content management world. There was finally a tool that would help people find content no matter where it was located. This is one of the primary struggles that I work with clients with all the time. People love to think that adding custom managed metadata and building a super complex information architecture will allow people to find content easier. In some use cases this works but as a daily business practice this can drive people away. And once you break down those ECM walls you end up with unorganized chaos. As an ECM guy my palms get sweaty just thinking about some of the setups I have worked on where millions of files are strewn across file shares with no good way to ever find anything. So when Delve came along and basically said; “I don’t care where your content is – here are the files that I think you should be using.” this lessened the need of an in-depth ECM process and at the same time opened up people’s eyes around content security. I don’t want to go too much into Delve as a whole but here is some quick info and handy links before I break down how to hide content.

What is Office Delve?

• Delve helps you discover the information that’s likely to be most interesting to you right now – across Office 365. Find information about people – and through people – and help others find you.
• You don’t have to remember the title of a document or where it’s stored. Delve shows you documents no matter where they’re stored in OneDrive for Business or in Sites in Office 365.
• Delve never changes any permissions, so you’ll only see documents that you already have access to. Other people will not see your private documents.
• Office Delve for Office 365 admins

Hiding content from Delve

You may have a scenario in which you don’t want content to appear in Delve no matter what. Some examples could be high volume transactional processing files or payroll tracking information. Thankfully Microsoft has given us a simple way to hide content from Delve by using a site column called HideFromDelve. This can be done at the library level as well but I wanted to provide instructions so end users can have the power to add this column after it has been created once.

Important note: This will only hide content from the Delve app itself. The document will still be viewable via search and the Office Graph.

1. Navigate to the site that has a library of files in which you want to be able to hide them from Delve
2. Use the gear in the top right to go to Site Settings

   

3. Under Web Designer Galleries, click on Site columns
   

   

4. Click Create
   

   
   

5. Enter the column information and click Ok, the name and type have to be EXACT for this to work.
   
   1. Name: HideFromDelve
      
   2. Type: Yes/No (checkbox)
      
   3. Default value: No
      

   
   

6. Navigate to the library that you want to hide content and go to Library Settings via the ribbon
   

   
   

7. Under the list of columns, click the link Add from existing site columns

   

8. Scrolls down in the Available site columns list and select the newly created HideFromDelve column and click the add button to move it across. Then click Ok

   

9. Navigate back to your library and you can begin marking documents to be hidden from Delve. The quickest way to do this is through the Quick Edit view.

   

10. After the next scheduled crawl, the document will no longer appear in Delve!