What is Microsoft Viva?

Viva Connections

What’s better than an organization that is informed and engaged?

Viva Connections is an app that can be added from the Teams Admin Center that brings your organization's intranet to the front and center of the Teams app. You can display a custom icon and title in the left navigation bar to give quick access to the home site of your intranet.

A few things Connections can do for you

• Highlight specific resources by using your intranet's global navigation, and give personalized content like frequently accessed sites and news.
• Use your intranet in Teams
• Search for content that lives on your intranet right within the Teams search bar
• Share content quickly with the contextual actions added to the header bar depending on the content being viewed.

Viva Topics

Sometimes information about certain topics in your organization can be hard to find. Viva Topics makes it easy for people to find that information, by using AI to identify, process, and organize content.

Viva Topics is another app that can be added to Microsoft Teams to make this information easy to access.

A few things Topics can do for you

• Turn content into useable knowledge. With organizations having so much content and data spread across the company, Topics will use AI to organize it for you.
• Organize all that knowledge into topic pages. If Topics finds that common topics are being used around the organization, it will create a page for it all on its own.
• Make knowledge easy to find and consume. Having Topics process your data allows you to deliver topic cards to your team members in apps they use every day.

Viva Learning

If training and learning resources are spread out across multiple tools, employees may have a hard time finding them. Viva Learning creates a central hub to give employees quick access to those resources, all within Microsoft Teams.

This new app allows you to make all your learning content from different providers available in one place, including LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn, third-party content providers, Learning Management Systems, and content the company created themselves. 

A few things Learning can help with

• Easily search and share content in Teams chats
• Organize custom sections of learning content and create tabs for them to live in
• Assign learning to team members and track the status right within Teams
• Play LinkedIn Learning courses directly in Teams

Viva Insights

With work being as connected as it is today, it can sometimes still feel isolating. Viva Insights sets out to change that by using data-driven insights and recommendations to focus on productivity and wellbeing.

It’s great to see a tool that aims to find balance in a world that seems to be changing fast. It’s hard for employees to create balance in their work, and for leaders to stay connected to their team members all while being in the same room less and less.

A few things Insights can help with

• Personal Insights: identify opportunities to adjust how you work and be at your best. If it feels like people are scheduling meetings all the time randomly throughout your day, Insights can protect time in your day for breaks, focus, and learning.
• Leadership Insights: How do you see enough detail into what your team is doing without micro-managing? Insights is built with privacy in mind, keeping team activity at an aggregate level or removing individual identifiers. But, it also allows you to see how your team is balancing meeting time vs focused work time, as well as how much activity there is after-hours.
• Advanced tools and integrations: Insights comes with some reports out-of-the-box, but also allows you to integrate with other tools if you want to investigate the data further.

Conclusion

I'm excited to see how Viva takes shape over the next year or so, it seems to be filling a gap that needs to be filled. It is creating a lot of investment into Microsoft Teams making it "the one tool an employee needs", which could be really beneficial, or risky, it is yet to be seen. This is just stepping your toe into Microsoft Viva, follow along with the blog series if you want to learn more about each part of Viva! Next up, a little more on Viva Connections.