What is Microsoft Viva Engage?
Viva Engage is the newest member of the Microsoft Viva family. It was designed to help businesses create a sense of community, inspire engagement with senior leadership, share knowledge, and build personal networks.
Microsoft Viva Engage is a reimagining of the Yammer Communities app in Microsoft Teams featuring new tools to connect people, capabilities to find and share important information, express yourself, and find belonging.
In this article we will explore some of the new features and key capabilities, as well as looking at the future of Yammer, how you can deploy the tool and how the two solutions will work together.
Key Capabilities
News Feed
Functioning as almost a professional Facebook, Viva Engage features an everchanging newsfeed to keep you up to date with your colleagues, your leadership team and even your remote colleagues’ cute pets.
Build Engaged Communities
Create communities based on anything, business function, social committees, common interests outside the office, sports groups or whatever you can think of. This might sound a little fluffy, but it can be valuable in a number of ways, for example:
• It helps individuals engage with senior management building connections around common interests beyond shared goals
• Its help create strong bonds within teams and across functions
• Can act as a place to launch social events, sports teams, and more.
• Share questions and find answers to help develop employee knowledge and trust
Deploying Engage
Expected in late August early September, the current Communities app for Teams will be rebranded. For existing users of the Communities app for Teams, admins won’t need to take any action. Current Yammer customers will be able to deploy and pin Viva Engage on the left rail of Teams, like all other Viva offerings.
Future of Yammer
Yammer will continue to be a key part of 365 and Viva, with this update only changing the Communities app for Teams & Outlook. The Yammer web experience and the native Yammer mobile apps will remain in Microsoft’s improvement roadmap.
How will Viva Engage and Yammer work together?
Viva Engage will continue to show the same network, home feed, and communities that you see today in Yammer. Any content created in Yammer Web or mobile will be viewable in Viva Engage in Microsoft Teams. Likewise, content created in Engage will show up in Yammer experiences. Viva Engage will also respect any customer branding done for the Communities app. To use Viva, Engage an organisation must have licenses for Yammer.
Yammer has been a leader in employee engagement for almost ten years, and it will continue to be improved, simply delivered to your employees in a new way. The Microsoft Viva platform will serve to empower people and teams to be their best, have a voice when they may have not felt confident enough to share before, and feel included not just in their team but in the wider workplace. It’s been proven that diverse communities, meaningful and light conversations, cross-company relationships, and the confidence to share personal expression are critical to any thriving culture and organisation – and essential pieces of employee experience.
Together Viva Engage and Yammer will work together to deliver and improve those key aspects of your employee experience. To learn about other aspects of Microsoft Viva you can read our articles on-
– Viva Topics here,
Or to learn more about the platform in its entirety, and what it can do for you, you can book a call with one of our consultants.
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