Microsoft Office365 is doubtlessly a sophisticated collection of Microsoft tools which has an immense value for business. As you will store data across many of these applications such as Outlook, SharePoint, OneDrive etc.. It’s nice to have a single interface to see the spotlight of your collaboration activities and items you have been dealing with. Delve in Office365 helps us with this vital role, however, there are some scenarios people prefer to hide some content from Delve no matter how clear the approach is to them, and I believe that’s a fair requirement.
With this post we are going to learn how to hide a specific SharePoint content from Delve. There are several options as documented below.
- You can restrict a specific record
- Or restrict a library
- Or the entire SharePoint site from Delve
Before you start with this, it’s important to ensure whether you really need to do this. Ensure you have defined permissions in your environment appropriately so that it only allows authorized users to engage with content. Even after doing so, if you still want to restrict content appearing on Delve, there are few ways to get it done. Some of these approaches impacts on search results so do this with caution.
Option1: Restrict one or more records in a library
Note: This options wont hide content from search results, just in Delve. A hidden property in SharePoint called “HideFromDelve” can be used in this case.
Add a column to your library with the exact name (no spaces or special characters) – Add a Boolean field (“Yes/No“) and name it “HideFromDelve”
For the items you wish to hide from delve, set the property value as “Yes” and “No” to those you want to be appeared.
If you wish to hide all content of a document library, set the automatically default value as “Yes”
Select the particular item and go to details. Tap the button to “Yes” it.
Option2: Restrict a library
This option hides the target document library from both Delve and SharePoint search. TO do this simply head on to Document library’s advanced settings and set the “Search” to “No”
Option3: Hide a site
Note: This option will hide the entire SharePoint site’s content from both Search results and Delve at one go so beware of doing this.
Head on to target SharePoint site and look for “Search and offline availability“, under “Indexing Site Content” set “Allow this site to appear in search results” to “No“. Simple as that and the whole site will be hidden from Delve thereon.
Notes: Apart from this, If you wish you hide people from showing Delve and SharePoint online people search, it can be done as well. However, there are some limitations so you better go through this post – https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/SharePoint-Support-Blog/Exclude-Users-From-Delve-and-SharePoint-Online-People-Search/ba-p/170731
Again, I would like to emphasize that you should be aware of some downfalls this approach. If you have chosen to exclude some content form Delve appearance, there are other interconnected tools that may impact from this (Search is one as documented, and DLP [Data Loss Prevention] too). DLP heavily depends on the search index to apply its conditions and rules so if you are adding exclusions to a library or site from search, DLP will not be able to detect and eventually protect these content. Hence be very cautious.
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