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- What is the timeline for the Yammer Event Live to rebrand to Viva Engage Live?
- It would be great if we can influence the timing of the renaming on our tenant to plan our communication activities accordingly.
- Changing the name of Yammer at this stage is an unpopular move with my Technology and Internal Comms colleagues. Has anyone raised this in MS Feedback or here?
- MuraliSitaram
Microsoft
Georgeina, can you please help with any specific reasons why they feel that this is a bad idea? We understand that name/brand changes are difficult, but it's been over 10 years that we have maintained this brand name and in the meantime we have vastly expanded Yammer's original product goal and are impacting many of the largest organizations around the world, we felt it best to align with the Employee Experience category for Microsoft as it clarifies intent, purpose and direction for the long term.- Change fatigue - as an organisation we have a lot of change.
- We just got Yammer embedded - engagement has just returned to pre-migration levels about two years after we migration (from a SP blog).
- Yammer is a verb, with a specific meaning. You can work out what it means. 'Engage' is less transparent and so broad as to need explanation each time. Viva as a prefix becomes redundant or creates confusion as one person's 'Viva' is another's Viva Connections/Engage/other.
- More change (for us as delivery teams)!
- Might be helpful to have a one pager showing all the touch points with Viva Engage in the centre to the new features and interactions into Viva Topics and the other Viva modules -- if that's possible lol!
- KaleemRahmanHi Lesley, good to see you! Viva Topics play an important role in Viva Engage—both via Answers in Microsoft Viva and Communities. In Answers, topics provide the organizational unit to categorize questions. Each question requires being marked by a Viva Topic, and this serves as an important means to get new questions in front of people who may have the expertise to answer them. The concept of 'Follow' lets people indicate the kinds of topics they are interested in—further personalizing their experience. And an administrator can even decide which of the Viva Topics they want to enable within Answers for questions and answers. In Communities, topics continue to be available as a means to organize content for knowledge and learning. Moving forward, Viva Topics infrastructure will be used to enable the topics experiences in communities. With a premium Viva Topics license, features like topic cards will get enabled. With regards to a one-pager to show all the precise ways that Viva Engage interacts with all other Viva modules, I'll pass on that feedback to our team and see what we can do.
- Thanks Kaleem, a visual representation of the touch points would still be really helpful. Looking forward to seeing this and happy to sense check it before its made public with the MVP #VivaExplorers.
- This would be very helpful.
- Feed filters: how will the feed look in VE (both app and web)? If it is going to work as it does now in VE app, it is a bottleneck to both user experience (content is harder to discover) and admins (we can not filter conversations by order of appearance and can miss content that potentially needs to be moderated). It also does no good to ‘featuring’ conversations with current feed logic in VE app.
- Moderation. How will VE detect keywords? Will Purview work for VE?
- No ‘creation date’ filter in the communities catalog in VE app - any plans to add it?
- No switcher to the classic yammer -> no 365-day data. In our tenant, it is very important to have this data for communities. Group insights for 365 days were very comprehensive for our users, and none of them are experienced in building a PBI report, is there a way to bring this data back?
- How will links to posts work in VE? Imaginary situation: I work with the team in MS Teams chat, get a digest with links to Yammer/Viva Engage posts, click on them – and am redirected where? Losing MS Teams convo?
- How will the Yammer tab for MS Teams work?
- What are the changes announced for March? Yammer app simply renamed? Then what will change with Viva Engage?
Thank you!
Sandra_VargasRegarding VE and Purview
Viva Engage is the rebranded and enhanced version of Yammer. We have not yet rolled out the rebrand into Purview but the functionality works against both Yammer and Viva Engage.
To manage using keywords in eDiscovery or Communications Compliance moderation for either Yammer or Viva Engage, you will configure Purview for Yammer. Purview will be updated with the new branding in a future release.
- Is there going to be a better search experience in Viva Engage inside Teams? Yes, you can search inside Viva Engage while in Teams but it is super confusing at first. Integrating the Teams search bar to look into Viva Engage conversations, topics and people, etc. would be more practical.
- Sandra_VargasYes, the VE and Teams team are working to improve this behavior in future releases.
- What's the integration plan for Praises in Yammer and in Teams? Trying to keep these two apps distinguished in how it work makes a better case for Yammer adoption.
- Jason_MayansJust like you can have conversations in Teams or in Engage, you can also have a 'praise' post type. It's more about who you want to see the praise -- are you sending someone a praise directly or want to share with a team? Then you can do that in Teams. Do you want broader visibility or more of a 'public' praise that a community can see? Post in Engage.
ABBoozerAsking for a friend: "Will anything happen to the Yammer API when Yammer becomes Viva Engage? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/yammer/rest-api-rate-limits "
- Will the existing API continue to work? Will we need to re-code any existing integrations?
- Sandra_VargasCurrent Yammer API's will continue to work against both Yammer and Engage.
- Having each post with a unique URL is a key feature of our use of Yammer. Will the web experience with any community or post being accessible via a standard URL continue to be available?
- Jason_MayansYes, nothing changes with the accessibility of conversations or communities via the web at this time. (With the rebrand, eventually the front part of the URL will change, but we'll have to continue to support existing links).
- Thanks. As a reaction to "at this time" I'd strongly urge Microsoft to not deprecate the web experience for Viva Engage. Aside from usability factors (Viva Engage in Teams doesn't show as much info since it presenting inside the greater Teams app UI), not everyone has the Teams app open and we want to make sure that when we're linking to a community or post that our end-users have an easy and simple experience to be able to view the post/community.
- Will there be a possibility in the future that you can add a Viva Engage community to an existing Microsoft 365 group? In other words; 'upgrade' an existing Team to also use Viva Engage. At this stage it's only possible to create groups inside Viva Engage instead of the other way around
- Sandra_VargasHi Arjen, can you clarify the scenarios you are trying to enable? What is the expected outcome you are looking for?
- Hi Sandra, In my client's case, they are moving to a new intranet with new sites and groups. They want to utilize the power of Viva Engage for discussions in some of these groups. At this stage they have to create the groups in Yammer (Viva Engange) to do this as it's not possible once the groups are made. Because as of yet there is no option to add a Viva Engage community to an existing Microsoft 365 group in case they want to add more communities later
Fantastic questions and recommendations so far! Keep them coming as they pop into your mind, the more we share on here, the more the Yammer/ Viva Engage team can start to clarify and work on these fab suggestions that really matter to you and your business - a BIG thank you to all contributors, still time to add even more thoughts!
- MichaelHolsteThank you to everyone who participated! This AMA serves as a great snapshot of where we are in the process and helps us identify where we need to provide more clarity through support docs, blogs, and readiness content.
