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Microsoft 365 Blog
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Behind the scenes on Microsoft Viva with Microsoft Mechanics

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Seth_Patton
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May 10, 2021
By Seth Patton, General Manager, Microsoft 365 Next Gen Productivity & Employee Experience

 

As work evolves rapidly into hybrid work, we need to do more to empower people to feel connected and bring their best self to work. Microsoft Viva, which we announced in February, brings together communications, knowledge, learning, resources, and insights into an integrated employee experience through the Microsoft 365 apps you use every day. Your response to Viva, the first employee experience platform (EXP) built for the digital era, has been overwhelmingly positive. We’re just getting started on this journey and excited to help you learn more about Viva through a new Microsoft Mechanics series.


Watch our Microsoft Mechanics host, Jeremy Chapman (JeremyChapmanMSFT), introduce Microsoft Viva and explain the underlying technology and core options for enabling and configuring the platform. In upcoming videos from this series, Jeremy will be joined by our Viva engineering leaders to take deep dives into each of the Viva modules as well as how to set up and manage the experiences for your organization.

 


Here are the highlights from this first overview show in the series.


Microsoft Viva modules. Powered by the full breadth and depth of Microsoft 365, Viva is experienced through Microsoft Teams and the other Microsoft 365 apps you use every day. For now, Microsoft Viva includes four modules—Viva Connections, Viva Insights, Viva Learning, and Viva Topics—with more on the way.

 

  • Viva Topics uses AI to automatically organize company-wide content and expertise, making it easy to discover information and put knowledge to work.
  • Viva Connections is a gateway for your digital workplace. It provides a curated, company-branded experience that brings together relevant news, conversations, and other resources.
  • Viva Learning centralizes your learning resources in Teams to help you quickly discover and share learning content across your organization.
  • Viva Insights gives individuals, managers, and leaders personalized and actionable privacy-protected insights to improve productivity and wellbeing.

 

Differentiated experiences. Microsoft Viva relies on information from groups in Azure Active Directory—like roles, departments, and geographies—to give you a tailored experience, from targeted information in Viva Connections to curated learning courses in Viva Learning. If you’re a Microsoft 365 admin, you can customize those experiences further using granular but intuitive controls, like segmenting Viva Insights details for different roles or assigning knowledge managers in Viva Topics to ensure knowledge topics are accurate and appropriate.

 

Privacy and security. As you would expect, privacy and security are built into all Microsoft Viva experiences. Any information protection and compliance controls you have configured in Microsoft 365 are respected when you access content. Viva protects employee privacy and fully complies with local regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). For example, personal insights in Viva Insights are visible only to the individual, while insights for managers and leaders have built-in aggregation, de-identification, and differential privacy to protect individual privacy.

 

Platform extensibility. Designed to be an open and extensible platform with a strong and growing ecosystem of partners, Microsoft Viva is easy to integrate with the systems and tools your company already has in place. Integrations with Microsoft 365, Microsoft Power Platform, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and third-party products and services can deliver a complete employee experience in the flow of your everyday work. For example, you can build custom web parts for your home site and topic pages using the SharePoint Framework and you can use adaptive cards for your Viva Connections dashboard to expose specific content and target the right employees with the right resources. 

 

 

If you’ve read through this blog without watching the video, scroll to the top and check it out. The video has more details about each of the sections in this post. This is Part One of our Microsoft Mechanics video series about Microsoft Viva. Keep visiting this site or aka.ms/VivaMechanics for the rest of the series, where we’ll go in-depth on each of the Viva modules. If you’d like more information on Viva in the meantime, head over to aka.ms/Viva.

 

As always, we want to hear from you! If you have any suggestions, questions, or comments, please visit us on our Microsoft Viva Tech Community page. We will also be hosting our first Microsoft Viva Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA) event on June 23, 2021. Join us then to post your questions about Microsoft Viva, where members of the Viva team will be available to respond.

 

Learn more: 

Updated Jun 03, 2021
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