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Steps to hide content from Delve in Office 365

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!

How to Promote Office 365 Video Search Results in SharePoint

The Office 365 Video portal is a great solution for managing videos. It is much better than trying to host videos in a standard site collection in SharePoint Online. I don’t want to go into the Office 365 Video portal in this post but here are some great starting points.

After using the Office 365 Video portal both internally and with clients there was one area that I wanted to try to improve on, searching and finding. The majority of clients I work with have a standard intranet with many now being hosted in SharePoint Online. When I help with intranet builds I try to incorporate the search center as a key piece of functionality. In Office 365, this is a prebuilt site collection under the URL – https://domain.sharepoint.com/search.

With the search center, I try to include core metadata that can be used as refinement when possible. As the search center can be a central area for functionality I wanted to try to improve the usability of the current Videos vertical refiner with better incorporation of videos hosted in the Office 365 Video portal. Office 365 Videos are already returned in search results via this refiner but this will most likely also pull junk videos people have uploaded across SharePoint.  So I was looking for a way to clean this up.

  • A simple solution to hide junk videos is to promote all videos that are hosted in the Office 365 Video portal above any other items being returned through the Videos search results through a query rule.

Here was our search center before…

2016-01-15-23_11_28-Search_-Internet-Explorer_thumb (1)

Here is our search center after…

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As you can see the videos that we want people to see are now front and center.  I also added the Content Type refiner so people could pick other Content Types besides Cloud Video.

Steps to build the query rule

** As a reference I am building this query rule just on the Search site collection.  This could be done at the tenant level as well.  **

  1. Navigate to your search center as someone who has site collection administration
    • https://domain.sharepoint.com/search
  2. Use the gear to go to Site Settings.   Under Site Collection Administration click Search Query Rules
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  3. Click the Select a Result Source… drop down and select Local Video Results (System)
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  4. Click New Query Rule
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  5. Give it a name (i.e. Video Portal Promotion)
  6. Under Query Conditions, click Remove Condition. We are selecting this because we want this to fire on all events.
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  7. Under Actions, click Change ranked results by changing the query
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  8. Under the Sorting tab, change the Sort by to be by Rank
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  9. On the same sorting tab, click Add dynamic ordering rule
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  10. Now we get to change the ranking.  On the first drop down select Manual condition.  In the manual condition, we only want to return videos from the O365 video portal.  To do this we will filter by the ContentTypeID.  There is a new content type called “Cloud Video” that is published with videos in the O365 video portal.  The last section of the ContentTypeID is not consistent across channels (site collections) but the beginning string is.  Here is the condition:
    • ContentTypeId:0x010100F3754F12A9B6490D9622A01FE9D8F012*
  11. Ensure the last drop down states Promote to top and then click OK and Save.
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  12. Sit back and look at your great new query rule
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  13. Now if you run a search your good videos will always be before your bad videos
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The last step you could do is add the Content Type option as a refiner.  This is done through editing the page and editing the refiner web part.

With videos being available in search and the power of Display Templates in SharePoint, this could be just the start of integrating videos back into your SharePoint sites and user experiences.