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Storyline in Viva Engage and Microsoft 365 is now generally available

MichaelHolste's avatar
MichaelHolste
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Oct 12, 2022

Microsoft Viva Engage brings people together to connect in communities, join discussions, discover and share knowledge, and find belonging at work. Viva Engage also introduces storyline and stories, where you can share updates and experiences, celebrate milestones, and showcase your work. Learn more about coworkers from their storylines, and follow interesting people across the organization from the Storylines feed in Viva Engage and Yammer. You can also catch up with posts from people you follow in your inbox, Teams activity, and Viva Connections feed. Storyline is now generally available.

 

Find storylines from across your organization in Viva Engage in Teams desktop, web, and mobile.

 

On your storyline, you can share posts—which can include attachments, links, images and video as well as text—and, coming soon, stories. Stories, which will become available for public preview later this month, are a modern, engaging way to capture the moment, with short videos or photos that are showcased in a stories carousel. Storyline and stories help to strengthen personal connections between colleagues in a time when people frequently work across different locations and even time zones.

 

 

Storyline experiences across Microsoft 365

 

You’ll find your storyline, and posts and stories from coworkers, across a number of popular Microsoft apps. Including:

 

Viva Engage

 

The Viva Engage app in Teams offers the full storyline experience. You can view posts, follow people, get notifications, and share your own updates all from one place. A dedicated tab called Storylines brings together storyline posts and stories from across your organization. You can also pin the Engage app in Teams for quick access.

 

 

Viva Connections


Catch up with the latest storyline posts from people you follow in the Viva Connections feed.

 

 

Outlook


You can choose to see the latest posts from people you follow in your inbox, and engage or reply without leaving Outlook. You can also share to your storyline directly from Outlook with the New Storyline Post command. And soon, the Communities app for Outlook will inherit the Viva Engage brand.

 

 

Yammer


View, create, follow, and respond natively within the Yammer web and mobile experiences. You can also install the Yammer desktop experience (PWA) for a Windows version.

 

 

Get Started Using Storyline

 

There are countless ways to use storyline to share what you’re passionate about, amplify your work, and discover what your coworkers are sharing. Here are a few tips to help you get started posting to your storyline:

 

  • Introduce yourself! Upload a short video or write a post introducing yourself, including your skills, hobbies, and interests.

 

  • Ask a question. Get answers and opinions and get the conversation moving by asking a question. You can even designate your preferred response by marking a best answer.

 

  • Share where you’ve been. Share highlights, pictures, or videos from a recent meet up with co-workers, customers, or a trip you’ve gone on.

 

  • Share your experiences. Share what you’ve been learning about your customers, products, services or company.

 

  • Follow people. Stay connected to leaders and coworkers by following them from their storyline or directly from your home feed or the Storylines feed.

 

  • See your followers. Head to your storyline to view a list of who is following you.

 

For more tips and best practices on how use storyline, boost visibility on your posts, and gain followers, check out our new Storyline Playbook and other Viva Engage resources.

 

Go Further with Premium Experiences

 

New capabilities are coming soon to Viva suite customers who use storyline. In time, licensed Viva users will be able to share storyline posts on behalf of another user. Viva customers will also be manage leader storyline posts and content in leadership corner. Learn more about what’s possible with leadership corner. Soon, leaders and their delegates will be able to access advanced analytics to see a variety of personal and organizational analytics relating to how content is performing in Viva Engage.

 

Stay connected to leadership teams in Leadership Corner.

 

A handful of these premium features are immediately available for you to preview without any premium licenses required. The preview includes:

 

  • Conversation insights for storyline – Users see detailed metrics for conversations they’ve posted to their storyline including impressions, reactions, and comments.

 

  • Storyline digest –collects unseen storyline posts from followed people and sends it to the user once per week in an email or notification in Teams.

 

  • Post on behalf of (POBO) for storyline –POBO delegates can be given additional privilege of posting to the assigning user’s storyline.

 

  • Custom cover photo – This feature allows users to customize their user profile page by uploading a photo to be the background image for the header of their user profile page.

 

These preview features can be enabled on the Manage storyline page in Viva Engage and Yammer.

 

 

Catch up on the latest Viva news

 

To learn more about other Viva news and announcements for Ignite, watch the Ignite session Microsoft Viva: Latest innovations and roadmap for the new digital employee experience and read the blog post by Seth Patton.

 

-Michael Holste

Michael Holste is a senior product marketing manager for Viva Engage.

Updated Oct 11, 2022
Version 1.0
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9 Comments

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  • Anonymous's avatar
    Anonymous
    Jun 30, 2023

    I would like to be able to post to the storyline using the API.
    So far I have not found a way to do that.
    Are there any plans to offer this in the future?

  • Peter1984's avatar
    Peter1984
    Copper Contributor
    Nov 16, 2022

    Yammer is an important channel for company-wide engagement for us, and we've had good success with adoption and buy-in over the last 2 years. We pinned the Communities app in Teams 2 years ago for all 30k+ of our employees and encouraged use of Yammer within Teams, and we saw steady growth and engagement from the "top floor to the shop floor." After the name and icon change in Teams, many of our people simply got lost (wayfinding) because they didn't see the familiar name/icon in Teams, and the communities and unread count badges are "hidden" on the right side in Engage. I've had multiple leaders go to use Yammer in Teams, and they reach out to me saying "it disappeared in Teams for me" and when I tell them it's now called Viva Engage, they ask "is this Yammer or a new thing?" Please don't force us to waste cycles explaining this. 

     

    I am an enthusiastic fan of the direction of Storyline and Stories, and I'm looking forward to driving adoption... though the two-name thing makes it difficult to communicate without creating confusion. Trying to form a business case to our leaders why to invest in premium features is problematic when we can't explain Yammer vs. Engage.

     

    Requests for the Yammer/Engage team to consider:

    1. Please allow us to choose one name and icon across endpoints (Teams, browser, SharePoint web parts and mobile app). At least give us the option to pick one or the other and choose the timing of deployment so that we can manage/communicate the change. If you can't give us the option, than please pick one name/icon quickly so we can communicate and move forward with clarity.
    2. Please unify basic experiences across endpoints. The UI differences across Teams, browser and mobile app are pretty frustrating when you think about training and wayfinding. Example: list of communities on left rail in browser and hidden in right rail on Teams. 
    3. Please make the experience feel more native in the Teams UI. We want to reduce complexity of explaining all the tools, and saying that Yammer/Engage is just another part of Teams makes sense... except the Engage UI actually feels less native with the Communities list on the right rail in contrast to Teams channels list on the left. 

    Thanks for listening and considering our feedback!

  • DH34sdf's avatar
    DH34sdf
    Copper Contributor
    Nov 01, 2022

    This won't be turned on by default, right?  I swear to God, I will walk though every user's account and remove any licensing that I have to.

  • Stefan_Spinnler's avatar
    Stefan_Spinnler
    Iron Contributor
    Oct 31, 2022

    Microsoft, please talk with your customers. With employees worldwide suffering from information and platform overload, the solution cannot be to introduce a new platform that is Yammer in all but name while also being objectively worse than the former Teams "Communities" app. 

  • Charles Clive's avatar
    Charles Clive
    Copper Contributor
    Oct 14, 2022

    Having played with this a little, it feels like it's the missing puzzle piece in making Viva Engage/Yammer (please, Microsoft, pick and stick with a name) feel truly social and personal. I'm excited to see how this will change how people use this platform.