If you have gone looking for Delve in Microsoft 365 recently and found it missing, you are not imagining things. Microsoft retired Delve on 16 December 2024, and for a lot of organisations it quietly took away the easiest way to find a colleague, see who they report to and stumble across the documents they were working on. The question people are now asking is simple: what is the best Delve alternative for finding people across SharePoint and Microsoft 365? This guide explains what Delve actually did, what has changed since it went away, what Microsoft points you to as a replacement, and the realistic options for a proper searchable staff directory.
What Delve did, and why people miss it
Delve was never really a document manager, even though that is how it was often described. In day to day use it did three things well. First, people search: you could type a name and get a person, not a wall of files. Second, profiles: each person had a page with their photo, job title, contact details and reporting line. Third, document discovery: it surfaced files relevant to you or to the person you were looking at.
For most staff, the first two mattered far more than the third. Delve was the closest thing many tenants had to a company directory that anyone could open and use without training. That is exactly why its retirement has left a real gap.
What has changed since Delve retired
The core point to understand is that Microsoft did not ship a single drop in Delve replacement. There is no button labelled "the new Delve". Instead, the features that lived inside Delve have been spread across several existing surfaces. When Delve was switched off, Microsoft pointed users towards a handful of destinations, each of which covers part of what Delve used to do:
- Profile Cards. The small pop up card you see when you hover over or select a person's name in Outlook, Teams and other apps. Useful in context, but you have to already know who you are looking for.
- Updated profile pages in Microsoft 365 search. A person's profile now appears through search rather than through a dedicated Delve app.
- Office.com and OneDrive. These carry some of the recent files and activity that Delve used to surface, but they are built around you and your own documents, not around browsing the organisation.
- Org Explorer. Available in Teams for some organisations, this shows reporting lines and teams, but it is not switched on everywhere and it is not a general directory.
The gaps left behind
None of those surfaces is a full, searchable company staff directory on its own. If you want to answer a question as ordinary as "who works in the Manchester office", you quickly find the pieces do not sit together. Presence, the org chart and celebrations such as birthdays are scattered across different apps, if they are available at all. Profile Cards need you to know the name first, and search returns people mixed in with files and emails. The result is that most staff give up and ask a colleague instead, which is precisely the behaviour Delve used to remove.
Choosing a Delve alternative: build or buy
Once you accept that Microsoft's built in surfaces will not, by themselves, replace Delve, the choice comes down to two realistic paths. You can build your own directory from the tools already in SharePoint, or you can add a dedicated employee directory web part. Both are legitimate. The right answer depends on how much ongoing maintenance you are willing to carry.
Option one: build your own from the People web part and lists
SharePoint Online already includes a People web part, and you can pair it with a modern SharePoint list to hold extra fields such as location or team. With some patience you can create a page that lists staff, and our companion guide on how to create an employee directory in SharePoint Online walks through the approach in detail. It is a sensible first step, and for a small team it may be all you need.
The catch is maintenance. A hand built directory tends to drift out of date the moment someone joins, leaves or moves department, because it relies on people remembering to update a list rather than reading live data from your tenant. You also end up rebuilding, piece by piece, the things Delve gave you for free: photos, search that filters by department, and any sense of who reports to whom. Building the reporting line by hand is a project in itself, which is why many teams look at a separate SharePoint org chart web part to cover just that part.
Option two: a dedicated employee directory web part
The alternative is to install a purpose built directory that reads live data from Microsoft 365, so it stays current without anyone maintaining a list. This is where Glow Cloud Directory fits. It is an SPFx web part for SharePoint Online and Microsoft 365, and it is designed to put the pieces Delve scattered back into one place.
In practical terms, a directory like Glow Cloud Directory covers the everyday jobs people used to rely on Delve for:
- Finding a person fast. Instant, debounced search across name, job title and department, with filters for department and office location and an A to Z jump bar for browsing.
- Rich contact cards. Live cards showing Microsoft 365 profile photos, with a Fluent person card that offers Teams chat via a deep link and a video call.
- Knowing who is around. Real time Teams presence, showing available, busy or away, cached for about 60 seconds so the view stays responsive.
- Seeing the structure. An org chart showing a person's manager and direct reports, loaded on demand through a single Microsoft Graph batch call.
- The human touches. Opt in birthdays and work anniversaries, plus self service "Your info" custom profile fields so people can keep their own details current.
Guest users are excluded by default, and administrators can export or import the configuration as JSON and the exclusion list as CSV, which makes it straightforward to move settings between site collections.
What about privacy and data
A fair question when replacing a Microsoft first party feature is where your data goes. Glow Cloud Directory runs as the signed in user and uses only three read only Microsoft Graph scopes: User.Read.All, Presence.Read.All, and User-LifeCycleInfo.Read.All for work anniversaries. No directory data leaves your tenant; only the licence details, meaning the tenant ID and billing email, are stored. It has no Microsoft Graph Toolkit dependency. For organisations that were comfortable with Delve reading tenant data, that is a familiar footprint rather than a new one.
So which Delve replacement is right for you?
If your team is small and rarely changes, Microsoft's built in surfaces plus a simple People web part page may be enough. If you have more than a handful of staff, regular joiners and leavers, or people who simply want to open one page and find anyone with a photo, presence and an org chart, a dedicated directory will save far more time than it takes to install. The honest trade off is maintenance effort against upfront setup: build it yourself and you own the upkeep, or buy a directory and let it read live data for you.
Glow Cloud Directory is a Glow Cloud Kit product from Glow Cloud Solutions. It starts from £29 a month per tenant for unlimited users, and it is purchased through Glow Cloud Kit. If Delve's retirement has left your people struggling to find each other, the simplest way to judge a replacement is to see it running on your own data, so you might start the 14 day free trial and try Glow Cloud Directory in your own tenant before you decide. You will also find more guides covering directories, org charts and profiles across Microsoft 365.