No, it's not a super-secret Norwegian spy mission, and beyond the name (honoring the Microsoft engineering team in Norway), Codename Oslo has little to do with Scandinavian geography. We've had Oslo for several months now, enough time to get an idea for exactly how the features will change the Office 365 interface.

The new Microsoft app, instead, improves the geography and connectivity of Office 365. Oslo (also known as Office Graph) will allow business account users to use a searchable, customized dashboard to quickly find relevant trends, documents, messages, and social signals organized by a personalized algorithm.

How Office Graph Will Change Small Business

According to Microsoft, Office Graph will help users get over a bad habit: getting stuck constantly working from the top of email inboxes while ignoring or procrastinating on deeper but no less important tasks. Specifically, Microsoft hopes that Office Graph will:

• Help companies respond rapidly to changes by taking advantage of the "human network" embed in every organization.
• Open and connect communication and collaboration to make company knowledge a natural byproduct of workflow.
• Empower employees to make better decisions and tap into an organization's collective knowledge.

By all appearances Microsoft is attempting to create some distance between their cloud applications and competition from Google and Dropbox by embracing social networking. Yammer's popular "Groups" feature will now be spread across the Office 365 interface (Yammer was acquired by Microsoft in 2012 for $1.2 billion) to spearhead the social innovation from Microsoft. In fact, Office Graph is actually an extension of Enterprise Graph across Office 365 to map relationships within an organization.

Tasks in the Office Graph dashboard will take on a new appearance, a collection of cards with comments, likes, views, and other identifying information to help make them easier to organize. Olso marks the first time that Microsoft will attempt the flipboard-like tiled experience to make plain SharePoint data much more pleasant to look at and much easier to use. Utilizing the Office Graph, Oslo creates a single user interface to personalize insights based on conversations, users, meetings, and documents. Interacting with any SharePoint card launches the application to let users edit cards, add comments, and reorganize data to meet project-based needs. Office Graph's personalized experience will tap into users' activity in Yammer, Lync, Exchange, Outlook, Office, and SharePoint.

Microsoft has recently launched other new features to improve their online business products. At its SharePoint conference in Las Vegas in March, Microsoft revealed the new Video Portal designed to make it easier for users to upload videos to Office 365.

For more information about Codename Oslo, check out Microsoft promotional video available here.