Codename Oslo

At the SharePoint Conference 2014 in Las Vegas Microsoft announced Codename Oslo. Codename Oslo was one of the major new announcements at the conference. Codename Oslo combines the new Office Graph (social graph) with the search index and presents information in an attractive user interface.

The FAST team has built a flip-board like user interface that surfaces information relevant to you based on the people you connected to various ways. The information is search driven and rank determines what gets on top. As new information becomes available, it will appear on the top in a feed-like fashion. Oslo is an application on Windows or your phone. It will also be available in an out-of-the box web portal in Office 365 with a similar look&feel. This is part of a new initiative for next generation portals. Notice Oslo in the top navigation:

The information in Oslo is based on what is called the Office Graph.

The graph identifies who you are connect to through what is called signals. In version 1, connections will be based on

• Who I send e-mail to (recipient cache in Exchange)
• Distribution lists in Exchange
• Co-authors (people who modified the same document in SharePoint)
• Who I share with (in v1 this will be documents you share in your OneDrive for Business)

An API will also be made available in due time for third parties to send other signals to the graph and create new user interfaces.

When searching for information you can enter a search query and specify a few refiners (picture from @CodenameOslo):

The following refiners are available

• Presented to me. When you press F5 in power point, and you have a meeting in your calendar at this time, the PowerPoint client will send a signal back to SharePoint with who were in the same meeting, which is then processed in the graph.
• Modified by me. Documents in SharePoint you have modified.
• Liked by me. In v1 this is likes in the Oslo interface, later Yammer will be integrated.
• Viewed by me. Documents you have viewed.
• Shared with me. Based on documents shared in OneDrive for Business.
• Trending Around Me. Based on people around you in the Office Graph and what is viewed, liked and commented on.

Comments are persisted in yammer. If you comment on a document in Oslo, and the document is not shared on yammer yet, Oslo will create a graph object for the document in the yammer social graph.

In v1, Oslo is focused on documents. The Oslo team has also worked with the Office Video team to show videos from the video portal. Content such as news (publishing) or blog posts are not shown. When you click on a document, Oslo will dock on the left hand side of your screen and open a browser window where you can open the document and see comments on the document on the right hand side.

Oslo is scheduled for release in in the second half of 2014 and the feature set is pretty much baked for v1. Currently there is no decision if Oslo will be delivered on-premises.

I think this is a very interesting development from Microsoft and the most exciting news announced at SharePoint Conference 2014. See Impressions from the SharePoint Conference for other things I learned at SPC.