Microsoft Viva: A New Platform Designed for the Future of Remote Work

Microsoft Viva is the new push from Microsoft to help businesses with telecommuting and a big bet that this new way of life will become the norm. It is designed to act as a portal for employees and businesses to navigate the complexities of working from home. Microsoft launches Viva today, with parts of the platform to be launched during 2021.

“We participated in the largest, large-scale remote work experiment the world has ever seen,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, highlighting nearly 11 months of a pandemic learning the shape of the way people work. and live. ‘As the world recovers, there is no going back. The most important thing is when, where and how we work. ”

Microsoft Viva is not an app or even a service, but more a platform to improve remote work and help businesses adapt to it. While businesses collectively spend billions of dollars annually on employee well-being, Microsoft thinks Viva will help in this new digital age of work.

“We need to stop thinking about work as a place, and start thinking about how to maintain culture, connect employees and harness human ingenuity in a hybrid world,” said Jared Spataro, head of Microsoft 365. Spataro quickly got early predict. in the pandemic that it will change the way we work and learn forever, and that Microsoft Viva is clearly the result of trends that Microsoft has seen.

Designed for this new flexible and digital era of work, Viva integrates into Microsoft Teams and rather works like the intranet of old by gathering key parts of a business in one central location. Microsoft divides Viva into four specific modules: connections, insights, topics, and learning.

Image: Microsoft

Connections include internal communications, or resources such as benefits and company policies. It’s also designed to be the portal you would go to if you were just starting a business and had never even met your associates due to pandemic shutdowns. “You can consider it a gateway to your digital workplace,” Spataro explains.

Built on top of Microsoft’s SharePoint technology, Viva Connections incorporates things like industry news, city halls, or even employee resource groups and communities. It is basically a dashboard to communicate with colleagues remotely.

Image: Microsoft

Viva Insights feels like the next step in Microsoft’s controversial productivity statement feature. Microsoft has been widely criticized for allowing managers to export data about individual employees through metadata collected from the software and services. The company was forced to make changes to its Productivity Statement, and Viva Insights provides similar data-driven insights for managers and employees.

Microsoft says Viva Insights will include data for executives and leaders to monitor work patterns and trends, but that privacy will be protected. “This means that personal insights are only visible to the employee, while insights for managers and leaders are standardized and denied to protect individual privacy,” says Spataro.

Viva Learning is the third module of Microsoft in Viva, and as the name suggests, it is about learning and employee development. This is where employers will host training materials, courses and other content for worker training. This will include content from LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn and even a business’s own content, as well as third-party training materials.

Image: Microsoft

The last module within Viva is topics. “Think of Viva topics as a Wikipedia for the organization,” Spataro explains. It uses AI to organize content and automatically locate topic maps with documents, videos, and related people. Viva Topics generates topic maps from applications like Office, Teams and SharePoint.

Microsoft Viva partially launches today. Viva Topics is now available to Microsoft 365 customers, and a public preview of Viva Insights begins today. Microsoft is also launching a private preview of Viva Learning and plans to announce more additions to Microsoft Viva during 2021.

Microsoft says that it first started with Microsoft Viva and that it was designed to be an ‘open and expandable platform’ for partners. Viva also promotes Microsoft’s ambition to put Teams at the center of its work strategy and to be at the center of everything the company does.

Like Microsoft Teams’ Feature Together mode, Viva is clearly inspired by the pandemic era of remote work. Although there is still a debate about how dramatically office work will change once the pandemic is over, Microsoft is betting a lot that the way we are currently working is the new normal.