Large, Multi-Tenant Organizations find value with cross-tenant communications support in Viva Engage

Modern organizations are complex and often span across multiple tenants. Previously, Viva Engage launched support for Storylines for Multi-Tenant Organizations (MTO), and now we are excited to share that Communities are now supported across tenants in Viva Engage.

One of the key themes of customer feedback is the need for ‘seamless access to content’ across tenant boundaries. Whether it is Storyline announcements from leadership or the new ability for ‘global’ communities, Viva Engage uniquely supports the ability to seamlessly communicate and collaborate with coworkers beyond traditional tenant silos. 

MTO Communities recently launched and one of our key customers, Associated British Foods plc, created a pilot of Viva Engage MTO across 14 tenants with an initial set of 400+ global users to better connect their procurement function together for improved business collaboration and connection. Having reviewed multiple vendors, Engage was chosen due to its ability to provide single sign-on across multiple tenants and through its capabilities for improved leadership engagement, campaign management and its deep integration with the Microsoft suite.

The Procurement function aimed to create a centralized platform to enhance collaboration among its global teams facilitating seamless connection, communication, knowledge sharing, and effective teamwork. Given ABF’s decentralized structure, characterized by multiple tenants, our Procurement function needed a tool to seamlessly connect colleagues worldwide.

We leveraged Viva Engage Multi-Tenant capabilities, enabling Procurement colleagues to collaborate, join communities, and engage with leaders—all within their existing work environment. This platform, named “Ignite Procurement,” was launched at an internal ABF Procurement Conference in June.

Although we faced challenges in procuring Viva Employee Communications and Communities licenses centrally; with each business unit having to procure its own licenses, the integration has significantly supported daily interactions. It has strengthened the sense of community, increased cross-business interaction, and made ABF Procurement an even better connected place to work. Other business divisions within ABF are considering leveraging MTO capabilities to enhance global collaboration across multiple regions and teams. – Otonye Archibong (IT Project Manager)

A key challenge for us was the adoption of a solution across multiple tenants with the ability to provide single sign on. This was very important to the business as other solutions have failed when there are extra steps to login using a different account or switch networks. This also provides a different user experience across the teams depending on the tenant they are in, so enabling the use of MTO to seamlessly bring all our businesses together provided an excellent solution to this challenge. We are now looking to expand this across other tools such as Teams as new projects require global collaboration.  - Adrian Knight (Solution Architect)

The Core Principles of Viva Engage MTO:

1. Seamless Collaboration - Enable Leaders and Employees to connect, communicate, and collaborate effortlessly across all tenant boundaries
2. Equality - All employees are treated as Equals across all MTO experiences – Communities, Leadership Corner, Events, and more
3. Measurable Value – Empower Leaders & Corp Comms can measure value across tenant boundaries through Analytics
4. Simplified Configurations – Streamline admin configurations to make it easy to enable, manage, and change MTO capabilities

Since the initial launch and subsequent feature additions for Viva Engage MTO, a few themes that have emerged are “It Just Works!”, “No Network Switch!”, and “No More External networks required!”.

These scenarios have been guiding beacons that the team had laid out in their quest to provide value to customers for cross-tenant communication and collaboration reach.

The team is not done yet, and are working on bringing added capabilities that our customers want, such as:

• Ask Me Anything (AMA) for MTO [Now in Preview with customers]: This feature enables leaders to engage in an asynchronous dialog with employees across tenant boundaries, and in the process get a sense of what’s top of mind for them, what are some key questions that the larger organization is seeking input on

We will continue to bring additional capabilities for our MTO customers. Here's a peek at what we're building:

• MTO support for All-Company Community [Coming soon]: The availability of MTO Community support means we'll be addressing one of our top customer asks and make the 'All Company' Community accessible across tenants. 
• Live Events in MTO Communities [Coming soon]: Live Events hosted in MTO Communities will be seamlessly accessible to all members of the community and across tenants. 

If you are interested in learning more about how Viva Engage MTO can help your organization communicate and collaborate across tenants, we invite you to watch the recording of our webinar where we demo'ed and showcased the latest features and best practices.

Also, don't forget to check out our documentation and feedback portal where you can find more information and share your thoughts with us. We look forward to hearing from you and helping you unleash the full potential of Viva Engage MTO!