Viva Engage | The New Community Experience in Microsoft Teams

[Guest Zachary Cavanell]

Bring organizations together to engage across both personal and professional interests with Microsoft Viva Engage, a new experience in Teams and Outlook. The shift to hybrid workplaces has made it harder for employees to connect, engage, and build communities within their internal network. If you’re new to Viva Engage, it’s the evolution of the Yammer Communities app integrated in Microsoft Teams and will be coming soon to Outlook.

 

 

 

 

 

 

We’ll show you how it helps build communities within your internal network, and how you can share experiences and insights with the new Storyline capability using Stories — short videos and pictures that allow you to capture and share key moments. And take a look at a new feature called Answers that helps everyone find answers to their questions and receive guidance from experts across their organization.

 

 

 

Michael Holste, Sr. Product Manager at Microsoft, demonstrates how Viva Engage helps your organization stay connected using familiar tools and platforms.

 

 

Create and share what matters to you.

 

 

 

Reduce the feeling of disconnect and engage with peers across your organization — as a human.

 

 

Drive engagement.

 

 

 

Triage comments, review, and answer questions.

 

 

Raise a virtual hand and ask with confidence.

 

 

 

Connect with experts who are eager to share knowledge, provide guidance, and learn from your experience.

 

 

Watch our video here.

 

 

QUICK LINKS:

 

 

— Introduction

 

— Core Experiences

 

— Using the New Storyline Capability

 

— First Look at Premium Features

 

— Leadership Corner

 

— Social Campaigns

 

— Answers Hub

 

— Top IT Considerations/Questions

 

— Wrap Up

 

 

Link References:

 

 

Get started at Announcing Microsoft Viva Engage

 

 

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Video Transcript:

 

 

-Coming up, we’ll take a closer look at Microsoft Viva Engage, a new experience in Teams and Outlook to help you connect and engage with others at work. We’ll show you how it helps to build communities within your internal network, how you can share experiences and insights with the new storyline capability, we’ll introduce stories, short videos, and pictures that allow you to capture and share key moments, and take a look at a new feature called Answers that helps everyone find answers to their questions and chase down experts from across their organization.

 

 

 

-If you’re new to Viva Engage, it’s the evolution of the Yammer Communities app integrated into Microsoft Teams and will be coming soon to Outlook. With the shift to hybrid work, it’s designed to help bring your organization together to engage across both your personal and professional interests. Core to Viva Engage is your personalized home feed in the communities experience, which is powered by and fully integrated with Yammer on the back end.

 

 

 

-As you may have experienced before with the Communities app in Teams, the home feed is tailored to you and surfaces the most relevant stories, announcements, and conversations. The experience is similar to other social media exchanges you may have had, but it’s all internal to your organization. And as I move down the page, I can see announcements, discussions, questions, polls, and praise, as well as social interaction with posts, images, reactions, and replies on the discussions. I can share my thoughts and ideas here at the top, and above that notice the new tabbed experience.

 

 

 

-In fact, let’s take a quick look at the Communities Hub. Here, you can find and join communities aligned to your work and individual interests. On the right, notice the new quick navigation that I can use to navigate to my communities from anywhere in the app. Communities bring people together around roles and topics. This Sales Best Practices community, for example, allows people to engage, share news, and answer questions across sales teams, and share what they know. As you can see, Viva Engage centralizes all of your communities, interests, and conversations right into the Team’s experience.

 

 

 

-Now something entirely new is the storyline capability. Think of a storyline as your own space, where you can share your knowledge, ideas, and perspectives through your own voice. Anyone in your organization can visit your storyline to learn more about you. You can post your experiences, celebrate milestones, and showcase your work. Additionally, you can share short videos and photos of stories. On the Storylines hub, you’ll find a feed with posts and stories from peers. You can follow them to stay connected and easily share and exchange ideas. You can create stories on your PC, Mac, or mobile device, or you can upload an existing video.

 

 

 

-In fact, let me show you how easy it is to create a story from a mobile device. Using my device’s camera, I can capture the moment. This is a familiar experience you may recognize from consumer social apps, and when I’m finished, I can make quick edit if I want, and post it to my storyline. Anyone can engage with stories using comments and reactions. Your posts and stories remain on your storyline. They don’t expire, so all that work you put into sharing your experiences, knowledge, and ideas, never goes to waste.

 

 

 

-Now beyond the core experiences, let me show you a first look at some upcoming premium features in Viva Engage that empower leaders, in particular, to define their audience base so that they can reach and engage their employees more effectively. As a leader, from the Storyline, you can create posts and share stories with your own voice. If you want to share a particularly important update, it’s as simple as making a new post and then selecting announcement. Here you can send notifications to your audience across Teams and Outlook. Storyline announcements are a powerful new way to reach people while they work. I’ll paste in my announcement and post it, and then over time, Viva Engage will automatically show you quick stats on how the announcement is doing. And for even deeper insights, your personal analytics will show you a detailed look at engagement and performance.

 

 

 

-Beyond leaders, employees get a new experience too. Leadership Corner is your personalized view of the leaders you’re connected to. So you can stay aligned to what’s happening at work. Here you’ll find highlights from your leaders, you’ll see campaigns, announcements, posts, and more, so you can find out what’s top of mind, and, of course, you can react and reply to join the conversation. If you’re a leader, Viva Engage also enables you to host Ask Me Anything events. These are question and answer style events meant to drive engagement through open conversations. You can ask questions before or during the event. AMAs are a bit different from town hall events, since they don’t have video, and they’re usually focused on answering questions on one or more topics. Questions can be upvoted, and they also support nested replies. They’re also moderation controls to help triage questions and comments. Organizers and moderators can review and answer incoming questions. And we’re also adding the option for employees to post questions anonymously.

 

 

 

-Leaders also get a new dashboard. This gives you detailed analytics to understand your organization’s engagement and sentiment. You also get insights to help you identify and respond to top conversations and active communities where you can drive the most impact. So that’s Leadership Corner. We’re also introducing new social campaigns, which make it easier to rally people around shared initiatives in your organization. For example, here’s a post about a campaign that’s using a hashtag, and when I click in, I’ll see a new campaign page that aggregates all the content for that hashtag. At the top, you can also see campaign goals and progress. And as a campaign owner, it’s easy to see how well my campaign is doing, who my top content creators are, as well as top conversation, and engagement metrics.

 

 

 

-Next up is the new hub for Answers, which brings together Viva Topics with social Q&A. This lets you quickly find answers to your questions while connecting you with the right experts and knowledge. Front and center, you’re asked, what is your question, where you can get started. There’s also the Questions for you feed where you can see questions that you may be able to help answer. These questions have been tailored for you based on your own experience and knowledge, including the topics you’re associated with in Viva Topics. To help expand your knowledge, you can see topics trending within your organization where you can browse questions and follow the topics that matter to you. Once I enter my question, AI helps me chase down the answer as quickly as possible. You’ll immediately see related questions which have already been asked in case the answer already exists.

 

 

 

-You can dive into these to see more detail, upvote the question, or comment on it yourself. And if you don’t find your answer, you can still ask your question. You’re also prompted to add some additional context to help others understand the question. And you can add topics from Viva Topics to your question as well. Once you’re ready to post it, Answers will then use Viva Topics and other signals to put your question in front of recommended experts in their own Questions for you feed, as well as in notifications. So those are the core experiences, and what’s coming for individuals and leaders with Viva Engage.

 

 

 

-Now, let’s switch gears to look at the top considerations for IT. The new Viva Engage app, storyline, and stories are all available to anyone with a Yammer license, which is on by default for all Microsoft 365 commercial customers. But as an IT admin, you’ll have the ability to roll out the app and the new experiences based on your schedule and preferences. First, since this is a Teams app, in the Teams admin center, you have control over app availability for users, and you can pre-provision the Viva Engage app for Teams. We recommend pinning it, so that it’s always visible in the Teams app bar.

 

 

 

-Viva Engage is backed by Yammer, so it uses the same services, infrastructure, and policies you set for Yammer. Security, privacy, and compliance considerations remain the same. And to answer another common question, files shared on storylines, like videos used for stories, are stored in OneDrive. So storyline files are backed by the same consistent information protection and governance controls you use to manage OneDrive. Then for upcoming capabilities, you’ll need to assign the right Viva licenses to users, and in the Viva Engage app match leaders with their audiences by using groups. And the good news is that the groups can be security groups, distribution lists, or Microsoft 365 groups that you’re already using now.

 

 

 

-So that was a quick overview of Viva Engage. Our new experience to help you and your organization stay connected. To learn more and get started, check out aka.ms/VivaEngage, and keep checking back to Microsoft Mechanics for the latest updates, subscribe to our channel, and thanks for watching.

 

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