On 2 November 2021, Microsoft announced a set of new features for Microsoft Viva to help organisations to enhance their employee experience. One announcement that is of particular interest to organisations who see the value in all the premium features of Microsoft Viva is that customers will be able to purchase all pillars as a single suite, including the recently acquired Ally.io once it is integrated into the Microsoft Cloud over the next year. The listed combined list price will now be $9 compared with $12 for each individually. All pillars are also now generally available so you can make use of Connections, Topics, Insights and Learning in your full environments now. So, what else has been announced?
Additional premium features for Viva Insights
Where much of the premium features in Viva Insights were previously related to Workplace Analytics, there will now be more access to these in other apps as well. Managers and leaders will receive further information in the Viva Insights app in Teams as well as in their daily briefing and monthly digest emails that now come from Microsoft Viva. This will start as of this month.
Meeting organisers will have personalised insights and suggestions to improve their meeting etiquette and users will be able to share meeting plans that set expectations on meeting behaviours such as shorter meetings by default and always including a Teams Link.
New Viva Topics updates coming soon
Over the next few months, additional features will become available that will allow knowledge held in more areas of Microsoft 365 such as Outlook email and Yammer communities. This will bring more of the knowledge from the areas that it is talked about to where people need it. There will also be more support for people asking questions with questions routed to suggested experts if an answer cannot be found.
For larger organisations or those with a lot of existing knowledge, there are more tools that will allow for management of topics such as automated grouping of related topics and further analytics, as well as a way to manage feedback in a workflow. For multi-language organisations, it will also be possible to crawl content written in French, German and Spanish.
More capabilities with SharePoint Syntex
Syntex has slowly been gaining traction since it was announced at Ignite in 2020 but now there are more features that will be included. Users will be able to build new content from existing sources so that you can turn existing documents into automatic templates, contracts, invoices, etc. It will also allow contracts to be created with standard clause libraries and automatic classification.
These new features will be backed up with the ability to have further search capabilities as the tagged metadata will improve the power of Microsoft Search and allow for natural language search. Any links to taxonomy services will also link up with Viva Topics to create topics based on the tagged contents.
Greater integration with third-party content
One of the greatest features that holds across the Viva pillars is the ability to get the benefits of your existing investments in other platforms and services in one place with Microsoft Teams. This is being extended further with more integrations either generally available now or by January 2022*.
- Viva Learning: SAP SuccessFactors, Cornerstone OnDemand, Saba, Coursera, Skillsoft, Pluralsight, edX, Udemy, Go1, Infosec, Josh Bersin Academy, Udacity*, Harvard Business Review*, OpenSesame* and EdCast*
- Viva Connections: Qualtrics, ServiceNow, UKG, Talentsoft, StandOut by ADP, Adobe Sign, Moveworks, Lifeworks, Limeade, Tribute, Blue Yonder, Zebra-Reflexis, Workday*, DocuSign*, EdCast* and Espressive*
- Viva Insights: Headspace, Qualtrics and Glint
Getting Started with Microsoft Viva
Whether you are new to Microsoft Viva or have been following along with what has been happening, CPS can help get you started on your journey to improved Employee Experience. Speak to us today.
Read more about the announcements at Microsoft Viva is now generally available to help transform your hybrid work experience - Microsoft 365 Blog
Author
Kevin is a solutions architect and comes with a wealth of knowledge in both public sector and commercial organisations providing many years of consulting advice. As a Microsoft MVP, he is interested in SharePoint and is a Microsoft Office 365 specialist. Kevin also represents CPS at various user groups and is a seasoned conference speaker.
