Microsoft announces Office Graph with search and social features

Office Graph evaluates your Web searches and online interactions by mapping likes, posts, replies, shares, and uploads by an Office 365 user. Microsoft's new Office Graph is based on Yammer's concept of the Enterprise Graph across Office 365. Notably, Microsoft Corp bought the online social network firm Yammer Inc for $1.2 billion in June last year. Yammer, which had 5 million users of its own at the time of acquisition, helped companies' internal communications and collaboration by allowing employees to form groups and interact with each other freely. Yammer had companies such as Ford Motor, Supervalu and Deloitte as customers.

The Redmond giant claims that new personalised and contextual experiences for people using Office 365 will be powered by the Office Graph. The company also announced the first app leveraging the Office Graph, code-named Oslo.

The official blog post by Jared Spataro, General Manager of Enterprise Social, Microsoft notes, "Oslo (the codename for a brand new app) is the first application to help people put the Office Graph to work, delivering personalised insights and connecting the dots to help people get their jobs done. By tapping into the Office Graph, Oslo provides a natural way for users to navigate, discover, and search people and information across an organisation."

The blog post by Jeff Teper, corporate vice president, Office Service and Servers group details the Office Graph, "Today we're showing examples of innovation in the cloud that I'm really excited about, that serve unmet needs in most organisations today, and that allow organisations to work more like a network. By leveraging insights from Office 365 and mapping the relationships between people, groups, files and conversations through machine learning, we can intelligently connect and surface the most relevant content using the Office Graph."

In February, Microsoft announced that it would rename its Office Web Apps to Office Online, which included the online versions of its popular Word, PowerPoint and Excel apps.