M
Michael Holste
Today, Microsoft unveiled new innovations within Microsoft Viva that lay a blueprint for creating high-powered organizations through intelligent employee skilling, streamlined communications, and integrated applications. But that’s not all. We’re also adding an array of capabilities throughout Viva to help employees and communicators reach new heights of productivity, engagement, and alignment across web, mobile, and app experiences.
What’s new in Viva Connections
Earlier this year, we introduced the ability to create multiple experiences of Viva Connections for organizations looking to provide numerous employee apps and a new ServiceNow dashboard card. And now, we have even more updates for Viva Connections.
Refreshed landing experience for Viva Connections
A new version of Viva Connections is coming! This updated look and feel that can be customized to your brand with a dedicated hero section to highlight organizational news. It also revamps the Dashboard and Resources sections and introduces a new place for announcements and curated and individually managed links that supports icons. This phased release moves wayfinding to other Viva apps to the bottom of the dashboard, featuring quick ways for users to navigate to the apps they are licensed for.
Redesigned sections and icons in Viva Connections highlight content and links.
Announcements
With Announcements in Microsoft Viva Connections, corporate communicators can now target important communications like urgent announcements, role-specific updates, and safety policy changes to frontline workers. These important messages are delivered through push notifications and announcements that surface in the home experience within Teams.
Announcements appear across different mobile experiences – perfect for frontline workers.
Dark mode
Change the colors on your screen, which can prevent eye strain and save battery life. Only available on mobile.
Desktop Search
Find what you’re looking for with dedicated search within the desktop version of Viva Connections.
Analytics
Understand how and when users engage with components of the Viva Connections experience. Learn more about how to access usage data here.
See metrics around traffic, usage, views, and engagement.
Homesite integration on mobile
Brings mobile up to parity with desktop by adding dedicated placement in the UI for Global Navigation.
New Cards for Viva Connections
We’re announcing a number of new cards and capabilities to make it easy to find the information you need, accomplish tasks, and take action from the employee app.
News card
Ensure announcements and company news get the visibility they need through the News card, which can be anchored to the top of the feed and targeted to different employee sets.
News sources can be selected and customized for each news card.
Search Template card
This allows you to build a card that can search against a non-Microsoft repository and create many new custom layouts for cards, such as searching for open conference rooms, trainings, line of business data, or airline tickets.
Card support for Microsoft Sway, Microsoft Forms, and PowerApps
Engage with Forms and content from Sway and PowerApps directly from the dashboard. These interactive cards enable employees to respond and submit responses without leaving the Connections app.
Submit responses directly within an adaptive card.
Field Services card
Bring a variety of service requests from your CRM data into dashboard cards. This builds off of our previous announcement here and supports a multitude of frontline worker solutions like changing bookings, opening and closing tickets, and managing orders.
People Search card
This scenario-focused card allows you to quickly search for people in your M365 tenant and message, call, or mail them. This card also builds on the generic search template that can be hooked up to any data source.
The People Search card will be available by the end of 2023.
Bot Powered ACEs
Create and manage ACE cards (adaptive cards) that are connected directly to bots.
Card Designer updates
Card designer is becoming the perfect low code solution for cards. Now you can directly access in-line data from SharePoint or the Microsoft Graph to build valuable cards and quick views. This can be done without writing custom code, all while maintaining the same level of governance and control that are key differentiators of Viva Connections extensibility mode.
Announcements
With Announcements in Microsoft Viva Connections, corporate communicators can now target important communications like urgent announcements, role-specific updates, and safety policy changes to frontline workers. These important messages are delivered through push notifications and announcements that surface in the home experience within Teams. Announcements are coming to tablet and mobile experiences in September.
Announcements in Viva Connections showing up on mobile device through push notification on mobile device and in Teams home experience pinned at top.
Add your organizational data
Coming late October, Organizational Data in Microsoft 365 is a new capability that will be available for use with your Microsoft 365 subscription. This new capability allows you to upload organizational data from HR information systems to unlock premium capabilities and features across M365 and Viva in apps such as Viva Amplify and Insights, as well as in augmenting the Profile Card. This will become general availability in early November.
Add your organizational data in the M365 Admin Center.
Viva Engage Updates
Articles (new post type)
We’re introducing a new way to post long-form content and newsletters into Viva Engage called Articles.
With Articles, you can design the post by adding images, GIFs, videos, and quotes where you want them and shape content using rich formatting.
Flexible design and a rich editor give you control over how the content appears.
Delegates can also create and share articles on behalf of other users and publish them to a community or storyline. You can also preview the content to ensure it looks how you want it to.
Use the new Articles post type to create and share newsletters in Viva Engage.
Network Analytics
See engagement across the entire network with improved analytics that includes activity, sentiment, and broad trends and themes about the conversations happening across communities and conversations in your network.
Get a breakdown of how people are engaging with content posted into Viva Engage.
Admins can view these analytics, apply time filters, and export the data to add to their own reports or Power BI.
See a quick view of common themes and get a snippet of conversations that include that theme.
Network analytics also includes a view of post contributors and top communities to help you track popular content and communities.
Redesigned and Advanced Conversation Analytics
Employees will be able to understand how others are engaging with their content through redesigned conversation analytics. In addition to the current conversation insights, new advanced metrics such as sentiment analysis, reader behavior signals, and support for multi-tenant organizations will be made available at the conversation level. Employees, leaders and corporate communicators will be able to understand where engagement is coming from, and the depth of engagement across their audience and follower base. These conversation analytics will reflect real-time updates, so you’ll be informed about any changes in engagement trends the moment they take place.
Draft and schedule posts
Now in Viva Engage, you can write a post, save it as a draft, and then schedule it to publish at just the right time. This popular request gives authors more flexibility in how and when they share. Drafts allow more time for adding images, editing messages, reviewing, fact checking, and scheduling to land at a particular moment – perfect for earnings calls, holiday greetings, or communicating with different time zones when precision is important.
Drafts and scheduling also support delegate posting (posting on behalf of others) for the web so key people continue to have visibility and control over content. Scheduling posts for specific times can help build consistency around conversations and optimize messages for your target audience.
And of course, drafts and scheduling work on mobile, so you can edit, save, and share wherever you are.
A view of the draft experience on the Viva Engage mobile app.
Communication Compliance in Engage
Discover how Microsoft Purview Communication Compliance empowers organizations to ensure communication compliance and enhance safety across all communication channels, including Viva Engage. With advanced features like reporting for inappropriate posts and comments within Viva Engage, organizations can swiftly detect and remediate violations, fostering a secure and respectful communication environment while avoiding costly penalties. Learn more about communication compliance in our announcement blog here.
What’s New in Viva Goals
Copilot in Viva Goals is now available in private preview for Viva customers. Using next-gen AI, Copilot in Viva Goals helps you generate goal recommendations from existing strategy documents, refine suggestions with conversational AI, and publish progress summaries based on contextual data.
We are also announcing the private preview of goal customization capabilities for customers who want to leverage Viva Goals outside of the OKR framework.
Exciting enhancements to our ADO integration have also just released, to make product and engineering progress updates more accurate and precise than ever in Viva Goals, as well as our brand new Export to PowerPoint feature.
Read more in our announcement blog post.
Viva Amplify is here
Viva Amplify, the latest addition to Microsoft Viva is now generally available! Amplify is a new app that simplifies and streamlines communications through centralized campaign management, multi-channel publishing, and reporting capabilities that help corporate communicators connect with every employee effortlessly.
Viva Amplify is a new tool for communicators within Microsoft Viva.
Go deep on the Amplify product experience and read how Microsoft IT is using Amplify together with Viva Connections and Viva Engage as part of our internal company strategy. Be sure to subscribe to the new Viva Amplify blog and join our new Corporate Communications Community to connect with product teams and hundreds of industry professionals as we share best practices, product updates, tips and tools, and more.
Viva Home
Microsoft Viva is introducing a new suite-level webpage called Viva Home, which will help users find Viva content and navigate to Viva apps. This is not a new Viva app but instead a pre-pinned webpage on Office.com that can educate end users about Viva capabilities and help them quickly jump to different areas within Viva.
Viva Home offers a new way to discover and engage with Viva apps and services
Viva on the web
Along with Viva Home, we’ve improved the way that users can find what they need. Now, most Viva apps are available on the web in addition to Teams and all available Viva apps on the web are:
Pinned to the waffle
Viva apps will be pinned after using them for the first time for easy navigation.
Discoverable in as apps in search
Now when you search for Viva, you'll see Viva apps in the results so you can find them directly from search on Microsoft365.com
The first five Viva apps will show within the app search bar.
App tiles for each of the Viva apps are also being added to the Apps Module (www.Microsoft365.com/apps). To further drive discoverability and reach, a new Employee Experience category has been added to host the family of Viva experiences.
Skills in Viva
We’re excited to announce a new AI-powered Skills in Viva service that will help organizations understand workforce skills and gaps, and deliver personalized skills-based experiences throughout Microsoft 365 and Viva applications for employees, business leaders, and HR.
Read the detailed Viva Community blog here.
Learn how customers are using Viva
Organizations are now realizing the benefits of adding Microsoft Viva to their communications and community solutions. Watch how Haleon, a combination of three consumer health businesses, GSK, Novartis, and Pfizer, is now connecting all of their employees through Viva, and discover how Microsoft uses Viva Connections, Viva Engage, and Viva Amplify internally to streamline company communications.
FAQ
How is Viva Home different to Viva Connections?
Viva Connections is a customizable employee app that can be branded and renamed by companies and includes a personalized feed, extendable dashboard, and intranet resources. In contrast, Viva Home cannot be personalized or extended and requires no set up. Viva Home is a website on Office.com that serves as an app launcher.
Why don’t I see Viva Amplify in my tenant yet?
Viva Amplify is rolling out worldwide and should land for all Viva suite and/or Communications and Communities customers this month. It will be available as an app in the app launcher (also known as the waffle) after first use.
Continue reading...
What’s new in Viva Connections
Earlier this year, we introduced the ability to create multiple experiences of Viva Connections for organizations looking to provide numerous employee apps and a new ServiceNow dashboard card. And now, we have even more updates for Viva Connections.
Refreshed landing experience for Viva Connections
A new version of Viva Connections is coming! This updated look and feel that can be customized to your brand with a dedicated hero section to highlight organizational news. It also revamps the Dashboard and Resources sections and introduces a new place for announcements and curated and individually managed links that supports icons. This phased release moves wayfinding to other Viva apps to the bottom of the dashboard, featuring quick ways for users to navigate to the apps they are licensed for.
Redesigned sections and icons in Viva Connections highlight content and links.
Announcements
With Announcements in Microsoft Viva Connections, corporate communicators can now target important communications like urgent announcements, role-specific updates, and safety policy changes to frontline workers. These important messages are delivered through push notifications and announcements that surface in the home experience within Teams.
Announcements appear across different mobile experiences – perfect for frontline workers.
Dark mode
Change the colors on your screen, which can prevent eye strain and save battery life. Only available on mobile.
Desktop Search
Find what you’re looking for with dedicated search within the desktop version of Viva Connections.
Analytics
Understand how and when users engage with components of the Viva Connections experience. Learn more about how to access usage data here.
See metrics around traffic, usage, views, and engagement.
Homesite integration on mobile
Brings mobile up to parity with desktop by adding dedicated placement in the UI for Global Navigation.
New Cards for Viva Connections
We’re announcing a number of new cards and capabilities to make it easy to find the information you need, accomplish tasks, and take action from the employee app.
News card
Ensure announcements and company news get the visibility they need through the News card, which can be anchored to the top of the feed and targeted to different employee sets.
News sources can be selected and customized for each news card.
Search Template card
This allows you to build a card that can search against a non-Microsoft repository and create many new custom layouts for cards, such as searching for open conference rooms, trainings, line of business data, or airline tickets.
Card support for Microsoft Sway, Microsoft Forms, and PowerApps
Engage with Forms and content from Sway and PowerApps directly from the dashboard. These interactive cards enable employees to respond and submit responses without leaving the Connections app.
Submit responses directly within an adaptive card.
Field Services card
Bring a variety of service requests from your CRM data into dashboard cards. This builds off of our previous announcement here and supports a multitude of frontline worker solutions like changing bookings, opening and closing tickets, and managing orders.
People Search card
This scenario-focused card allows you to quickly search for people in your M365 tenant and message, call, or mail them. This card also builds on the generic search template that can be hooked up to any data source.
The People Search card will be available by the end of 2023.
Bot Powered ACEs
Create and manage ACE cards (adaptive cards) that are connected directly to bots.
Card Designer updates
Card designer is becoming the perfect low code solution for cards. Now you can directly access in-line data from SharePoint or the Microsoft Graph to build valuable cards and quick views. This can be done without writing custom code, all while maintaining the same level of governance and control that are key differentiators of Viva Connections extensibility mode.
Announcements
With Announcements in Microsoft Viva Connections, corporate communicators can now target important communications like urgent announcements, role-specific updates, and safety policy changes to frontline workers. These important messages are delivered through push notifications and announcements that surface in the home experience within Teams. Announcements are coming to tablet and mobile experiences in September.
Announcements in Viva Connections showing up on mobile device through push notification on mobile device and in Teams home experience pinned at top.
Add your organizational data
Coming late October, Organizational Data in Microsoft 365 is a new capability that will be available for use with your Microsoft 365 subscription. This new capability allows you to upload organizational data from HR information systems to unlock premium capabilities and features across M365 and Viva in apps such as Viva Amplify and Insights, as well as in augmenting the Profile Card. This will become general availability in early November.
Add your organizational data in the M365 Admin Center.
Viva Engage Updates
Articles (new post type)
We’re introducing a new way to post long-form content and newsletters into Viva Engage called Articles.
With Articles, you can design the post by adding images, GIFs, videos, and quotes where you want them and shape content using rich formatting.
Flexible design and a rich editor give you control over how the content appears.
Delegates can also create and share articles on behalf of other users and publish them to a community or storyline. You can also preview the content to ensure it looks how you want it to.
Use the new Articles post type to create and share newsletters in Viva Engage.
Network Analytics
See engagement across the entire network with improved analytics that includes activity, sentiment, and broad trends and themes about the conversations happening across communities and conversations in your network.
Get a breakdown of how people are engaging with content posted into Viva Engage.
Admins can view these analytics, apply time filters, and export the data to add to their own reports or Power BI.
See a quick view of common themes and get a snippet of conversations that include that theme.
Network analytics also includes a view of post contributors and top communities to help you track popular content and communities.
Redesigned and Advanced Conversation Analytics
Employees will be able to understand how others are engaging with their content through redesigned conversation analytics. In addition to the current conversation insights, new advanced metrics such as sentiment analysis, reader behavior signals, and support for multi-tenant organizations will be made available at the conversation level. Employees, leaders and corporate communicators will be able to understand where engagement is coming from, and the depth of engagement across their audience and follower base. These conversation analytics will reflect real-time updates, so you’ll be informed about any changes in engagement trends the moment they take place.
Draft and schedule posts
Now in Viva Engage, you can write a post, save it as a draft, and then schedule it to publish at just the right time. This popular request gives authors more flexibility in how and when they share. Drafts allow more time for adding images, editing messages, reviewing, fact checking, and scheduling to land at a particular moment – perfect for earnings calls, holiday greetings, or communicating with different time zones when precision is important.
Drafts and scheduling also support delegate posting (posting on behalf of others) for the web so key people continue to have visibility and control over content. Scheduling posts for specific times can help build consistency around conversations and optimize messages for your target audience.
And of course, drafts and scheduling work on mobile, so you can edit, save, and share wherever you are.
A view of the draft experience on the Viva Engage mobile app.
Communication Compliance in Engage
Discover how Microsoft Purview Communication Compliance empowers organizations to ensure communication compliance and enhance safety across all communication channels, including Viva Engage. With advanced features like reporting for inappropriate posts and comments within Viva Engage, organizations can swiftly detect and remediate violations, fostering a secure and respectful communication environment while avoiding costly penalties. Learn more about communication compliance in our announcement blog here.
What’s New in Viva Goals
Copilot in Viva Goals is now available in private preview for Viva customers. Using next-gen AI, Copilot in Viva Goals helps you generate goal recommendations from existing strategy documents, refine suggestions with conversational AI, and publish progress summaries based on contextual data.
We are also announcing the private preview of goal customization capabilities for customers who want to leverage Viva Goals outside of the OKR framework.
Exciting enhancements to our ADO integration have also just released, to make product and engineering progress updates more accurate and precise than ever in Viva Goals, as well as our brand new Export to PowerPoint feature.
Read more in our announcement blog post.
Viva Amplify is here
Viva Amplify, the latest addition to Microsoft Viva is now generally available! Amplify is a new app that simplifies and streamlines communications through centralized campaign management, multi-channel publishing, and reporting capabilities that help corporate communicators connect with every employee effortlessly.
Viva Amplify is a new tool for communicators within Microsoft Viva.
Go deep on the Amplify product experience and read how Microsoft IT is using Amplify together with Viva Connections and Viva Engage as part of our internal company strategy. Be sure to subscribe to the new Viva Amplify blog and join our new Corporate Communications Community to connect with product teams and hundreds of industry professionals as we share best practices, product updates, tips and tools, and more.
Viva Home
Microsoft Viva is introducing a new suite-level webpage called Viva Home, which will help users find Viva content and navigate to Viva apps. This is not a new Viva app but instead a pre-pinned webpage on Office.com that can educate end users about Viva capabilities and help them quickly jump to different areas within Viva.
Viva Home offers a new way to discover and engage with Viva apps and services
Viva on the web
Along with Viva Home, we’ve improved the way that users can find what they need. Now, most Viva apps are available on the web in addition to Teams and all available Viva apps on the web are:
Pinned to the waffle
Viva apps will be pinned after using them for the first time for easy navigation.
Discoverable in as apps in search
Now when you search for Viva, you'll see Viva apps in the results so you can find them directly from search on Microsoft365.com
The first five Viva apps will show within the app search bar.
App tiles for each of the Viva apps are also being added to the Apps Module (www.Microsoft365.com/apps). To further drive discoverability and reach, a new Employee Experience category has been added to host the family of Viva experiences.
Skills in Viva
We’re excited to announce a new AI-powered Skills in Viva service that will help organizations understand workforce skills and gaps, and deliver personalized skills-based experiences throughout Microsoft 365 and Viva applications for employees, business leaders, and HR.
Read the detailed Viva Community blog here.
Learn how customers are using Viva
Organizations are now realizing the benefits of adding Microsoft Viva to their communications and community solutions. Watch how Haleon, a combination of three consumer health businesses, GSK, Novartis, and Pfizer, is now connecting all of their employees through Viva, and discover how Microsoft uses Viva Connections, Viva Engage, and Viva Amplify internally to streamline company communications.
FAQ
How is Viva Home different to Viva Connections?
Viva Connections is a customizable employee app that can be branded and renamed by companies and includes a personalized feed, extendable dashboard, and intranet resources. In contrast, Viva Home cannot be personalized or extended and requires no set up. Viva Home is a website on Office.com that serves as an app launcher.
Why don’t I see Viva Amplify in my tenant yet?
Viva Amplify is rolling out worldwide and should land for all Viva suite and/or Communications and Communities customers this month. It will be available as an app in the app launcher (also known as the waffle) after first use.
Continue reading...