Microsoft has announced that Viva Engage, announced last month at Microsoft Inspire, is generally available starting today. This is a social network of sorts, built into Microsoft Teams, and it’s essentially a successor to the Yammer Communities app in Teams. It’s essentially meant to be a way to engage with your co-workers in a more casual way, sharing experiences and knowledge.
Viva Engage comes with the features you already know from Yammer Communities – specifically, communities. You can join existing communities inside your organization, where you’ll find posts related to more specific areas of the company. You may have a community for the whole company, but also a community for the sales team, or one for leadership, and so on. However, Viva Engage also brings more of a personal focus with the Storyline and Stories features. These are coming later, so right now, it looks like Viva Engage is mostly just a rebranding of Yammer Communities.
Storyline is a standard timeline, similar to what you might find on Facebook or Twitter. People can view your storyline to see your personal achievements or any posts you choose to make on the network. The Storylines feed lets you see relevant storyline posts from people across the organization, as well as from people you choose to follow. This will be available in public preview in September.
Meanwhile, Stories are also pretty familiar if you know about Facebook Stories or any other variant of the feature. You can post short, expiring videos or images to promote an ongoing event or celebrate an achievement, without leaving it permanently visible on the site. This will launch in public preview in the next few months, so it may be a while before you can actually see it.
Microsoft Viva is an employee experience platform, as Microsoft calls it, and Viva Engage is just the latest addition. There are other tools, like Viva Goals, Viva Insights, and more, all designed to help employees achieve their targets. We’re likely to see more tools being added in the future, too.
Source: Microsoft