A Comprehensive Employee Experience Platform
Microsoft has recently begun rolling out their new employee experience platform, the first of its kind in this digital era. Microsoft is planning on having four different components make up the base of this platform; Viva Connections, Viva Insights, Viva Learning, and Viva Topics. Together, they create a comprehensive platform to enrich your employees lives.
So what will these different platforms offer? When can you expect them by? Our team has taken a dive into Microsoft Viva to learn as much as we can about the upcoming platform so that we can share it with you to help you make an informed decision on if Microsoft Viva is a good fit for you company.
Viva Connections
Viva Connections will focus on bringing your team members together, regardless of where they work. This can include everyone from the front line workers, all the way on up to the leadership team, and as far as the remote workers. Connections looks to answer the question of how can we keep our users informed?
Connections will bring the power of the modern SharePoint experience to your Teams with full navigation and user interaction options and capabilities. With this tool, Microsoft looks to demonstrate their goal of assisting different organizations with the hope that this tool will improve employee retention through company knowledge, and engagement.
Currently, Connections is not available. The expected release is set for quarter 2 of 2021, with a mobile release in quarter 3. They intend to add additional features through 2022 as well.
Viva Insights
Viva insights focuses on bringing powerful analytics to bear inside of Microsoft Teams through their new Workplace analytics offering. The tool will be designed to provide insights into an employee’s day to day to work life so your team can help employees make personal performance improvements to efficiency, focus time, and more. Insights will also introduce additional Power BI components to help improve the visualizations needed to analyze activity.
Viva Insights is currently in Public Preview Access with the intent of having additional products available near the end of 2021. To find Insights and get started with the currently available features, type “Insights” into Team’s “Find an App” search bar.
Viva Learning
Viva Learning is an exciting addition coming to Microsoft Teams that focuses on employee learning. Viva Learning will be a useful and powerful tool for employees who are interested in learning and advancing in their field in the workplace, especially as more employers focus on remote work. This tool plans to bring valuable information and opportunities to your employees, all while remaining in the Microsoft Teams application.
Microsoft Learning is currently only privately available with general and public availability coming later in 2021-2022. Hopefully, we will have more information on this as Microsoft continues adding more to this employee education tool.
Viva Topics
Viva Topics is a tool designed to organize project information and documentation together into topic pages to make it easier to stay up to-date on progress and activity. Microsoft’s vision for Topics is to increase the efficiency and knowledge of a team or teams working on different company tasks and goals. The idea, is that Topics might be able to replace a large portion of your company’s meetings, emails, and duplicated effort that all hurt the company’s bottom line.
Viva Topics is currently available through SharePoint Online for just five dollars a user per month. Microsoft is also looking to roll this platform out to Teams in the near future.
There is quite a bit to unpack from Microsoft’s new product offering. We believe this tool will be a fantastic option to help your employees on several levels as the rest of Viva is rolled out. If you want more information on Viva, or are ready to dive in and get started, contact us below, and we will help you get rolling with Microsoft’s fantastic new employee experience platform.
