What Is New In Teams Microsoft Viva

Microsoft Viva: The Future of the Remote Workplace

We are excited to share that Microsoft has made some exciting updates to its Teams collaboration platform. Designed for this new flexible and digital era of work, Microsoft Viva is the way of the future for maximum workplace experience.

With businesses and employees in mind, Microsoft Viva will help industries better navigate the complexities of working remotely or in a hybrid environment. It will improve user collaboration experience through the implementation of SharePoint content into Teams.

Microsoft Viva is an employee experience platform which is powered by Microsoft 365 and experienced primarily through Microsoft Teams, and is comprised of 4 modules focused on knowledge, insights, communications, and learning. Here is a brief summary of the enhancements and features upcoming with Microsoft Viva.

Viva Connections

Viva Connections brings your SharePoint intranet into Teams, you can access your SharePoint content, news, conversations, and other resources.

With Viva Connections you also get Global Navigation features within Teams, through the SharePoint App Bar. This App Bar features Global Navigation in your SharePoint modern communication and team sites.

It appears by default on the left-side and allows for consistent navigation across the organization’s site, featuring quick access to important sites, personally relevant sites, such as followed and frequent sites, alongside the news feed and files.

Features Included:  

  • Home Icon – this displays either the SharePoint Start page or Global Navigation links that can be configured.
  • My Sites – this displays sites followed and recently or frequently visited by the user. 
  • My News – this displays news posts recommended for the user that were published on the sites user has access to. 
  • My Files – this displays the recent files the user accessed from either SharePoint or OneDrive. The only feature that is customizable is the Home Icon. All other features are fixed.
  • Price – Viva Connections will be available to all customers as part of their existing Microsoft 365 license. 
  • Availability – Viva Connections is available now as a Teams app on Desktop, Mobile app in Summer 2021 and additional features will roll out over the course in 2022. 
Microsoft Viva Connections

Viva Insights

Viva Insights provides Personal and Organizational productivity reporting and tips; it builds on Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics.

Viva Insights helps you improve productivity and wellbeing by providing personalized recommendations to help you work better. This helps with building better work habits such as protecting Focus times during the day for uninterrupted work, following up on email work items, staying up to date with outstanding tasks and unread shared documents, pinning contacts, and reminders to scheduling 1:1 meeting with members of your network. 

  • Price – Viva Insights based on MyAnalytics is available for free. For Manager insights and organizational view, a Workplace Analytics license is required. It is listed at $2 per user/month for E5 licenses and $6 per user/month if adding to any other license level.  
  • Availability – Viva Insights is available now. Additional features will be added in the coming months such as personal wellbeing experiences, virtual commute, integration with Headspace for meditation and mindfulness. An integration with Viva learning will also be available soon.  
Microsoft Viva Insights

Viva Topics

Viva Topics uses AI to mine data stored in SharePoint. It collects information around a specific topic and generates pages about them. You can create Topic Pages about a topic and point to experts on that topic. It will also offer learning suggestions within the topic center, along with other knowledge resources.

Features Included:  

  • Topic cards – knowledge in context, with topic cards when you hover over the term surfaced across Outlook, Teams, Search and other Microsoft 365 apps. 
  • Topic pages – relevant content and expertise from across the organization in pages created by AI capabilities. 
  • Topic centers – place to manage all organization’s topics, recognize relationships between them, or manually add and create additional topics. 
  • Knowledge curation – enable experts across the organization to revise topics, pin resources, and identify other experts while Viva Topics learns and makes updates. 
  • Search and discovery – offer a seamless and integrated search experience across Microsoft 365, with topics discoverable in Microsoft Search and apps.
  • Management and administration – generate and show content to users based on their security and privacy settings in Microsoft 365.
  • Price – Viva Topics is listed at $5 per user/month on a one-year commitment. Microsoft is offering a 30-day trial for up to 25 users. Any user who interacts with topics will need a license. 
  • Availability – Viva Topics is available for General availability. 
Topics SharePoint Integration

Viva Learning

Viva Learning is an enterprise learning platform that creates a central hub for learning where people can discover, share, assign, and learn from organization’s own custom content, Microsoft Learn, LinkedIn Learning and other third-party content providers.

Viva Learning has partnered with content providers like Coursera, Pluralsight, Skillsoft and edX. Organizations with access to the resource libraries from these providers can seamlessly access that content within the Viva Learning app for Microsoft Teams. It will also show learning assignments a manager makes, whey they are due and user’s completion status. 

  • Price – The basic application could be free and include content from Microsoft Learn. Subscriptions will be required for content in third-party providers like LinkedIn Learning, etc. 
  • Availability – Viva Learning is currently in Private Preview with General availability later this year. Later in the year Microsoft will also make APIs publicly available so other providers can also integrate with Viva Learning. 
Viva Learning

Learn More

Want to discover more about Microsoft Teams & SharePoint? Read more here

Contact us to get started or learn how you can implement and use Microsoft Viva to its full potential.

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