Microsoft
Microsoft Delve lets you praise your coworkers for a job well done with a feature called — wait for it — Praise.
Praise is being added to Delve, a Microsoft Office 365 app that scans your email, calendar, documents, and whatever else to surface the stuff you need to see. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is reportedly a fan of the app.
Delve is kind of like Facebook's social-graph search, only applied to work. It provides a real-time news feed for what everybody in a team is working on, using data ganked from the Microsoft Office family of apps in real time.
Now it's getting a little more like Facebook, according to a recent Microsoft blog post.
When you see a coworker doing good work, you can Praise them, which notifies that person and their supervisor. That praise is publicly viewable, and additional coworkers can heap on the praise by adding Facebook-style likes. It's a way of saying "gold star for you, fellow employee."
If you want to heap on the positivity, Delve now lets you flag certain posts as "favorites," essentially turning it into a bookmark. But those favorites are only visible to you.
Finally, Delve is also getting a new "authoring canvas," a fancy way of saying that you can write blog entries and make custom web pages that you can share across the Delve network.
Praise is coming to the early feature adopter users of Microsoft Office 365 in the US starting Thursday, and favorites goes worldwide to early adopters then, too. The authoring canvas is starting to roll out to Microsoft's business customers Thursday as well.
In general, Microsoft seems to be investing heavily in making its Office apps smart and familiar to use. In all cases, it seems like that boils down to making them more like Facebook.
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