New experiences for video and images in Viva Engage

The improvements for recording video are a welcome addition.

I thought the product vision for Stories was a good one, but I'm glad to see Microsoft making an adjustment based on feedback. Viva Engage does an awesome job with photos and videos already and people are comfortable sharing these in the context of their regular community or storyline posts.

LOL Anna_Bolton thank you for sharing my response here! I came to this page, this morning, to do that and you saved me the time 🙂

Anna and Mandoss about the Storylines tab—we don’t currently have plans to remove the Storylines tab, however we have been discussing it. Our observation through telemetry is that it doesn’t get a lot of visits.

I would love to share our thinking here and get your thoughts!

There are three major features on this tab:

- the “discovery” feed which is just like the feed on HOME—personalized by AI to recommend the most relevant posts—but limited to storyline (Home also includes community posts). This feed seems to be particularly challenging on Storyline because a) there are fewer people posting to their storylines than communities (tho that could change) and b) viewers often see those posts elsewhere (including Home) and therefore the relevance and value of the feed on Storylines is lower.

- the Following feed which shows a reverse chronological view of storylines you have explicitly followed. The discovery feed includes these too (and generally they will be ranked higher than posts from storylines you don’t follow). This feed eliminates “recommendations” and lets you catch up with people you follow, period.

- the ALL feed shows you all storyline posts in your network and we believe is useful for admins and storyline “stakeholders”

with the tab getting low visits we are thinking of moving those feeds elsewhere in the UX and removing the aggregated storylines specific destination (tab). Like I said, it’s not happening right away so you can drive adoption of storyline with that tab today. But we would love your thoughts and observations as an input to future thinking!!! Thanks!!!

Hi tricialybrook, 

Are you planning to remove Storylines tab in general or just Stories carousel? We are a bit puzzled, as this week we had planned to promote Storylines with Stories carousel as a feature for our end users ( We were waiting to finalise transition to Native Mode).

However, after your announcement we do not know what we should really do 🙂  Will be great to hear some more information from you! 

Just wondered as well  @tricialybrook,  as Anna Bolton asks -  if Storylines is going to be a tab as showing up on your Teams app screenshot in general or if that will disappear?  we see storylines currently in the stand alone viva engage app but it isnt showing up via teams- which is odd. We aren't in any special preview group in our tenant so guess will have to keep an eye on the Admin centre to alerts to any changes that are dropped in general release.

Hi Mandoss, I've received a response from Dan Holme on LinkedIn:

So STORYLINE will continue to be available to all M365 customers at no additional charge.
Then, think about the STORIES preview as two major sets of features:

CREATE: these features will be available to all M365 customers at no additional charge. You can upload or capture (record) video and images with the awesome new OneCamera which supports camera and screen recording, custom backgrounds, annotating media with text and stickers, trimming and rearranging video clips, and more… anyone can create awesome consumer-grade media content. And it’s no longer limited to your storyline—you’ll also soon be able to create video and images with these new capabilities in communities.

 

VISUALIZATION & PLAYBACK: in the preview, “stories” were shown in separate feeds—a stories carousel at the top of the home feed and each user’s storyline. Now, posts with video and images created with the new tools will be integrated directly into the feeds—not in a separate carousel. And again this will come to both storylines and communities, and aggregated feeds like Home. For all customers.

But for Viva customers (“premium”) we are enhancing the presentation of video and images so that their video and images are *showcased* and really stand out in feeds and expand to an immersive viewing experience.
A Viva customer’s video and images will look even more amazing to *all* users (Viva licensed or not). The premium creator can create even better looking media content.

 

danholme thanks for reaching out and leaving this comment. Here is a perspective from Adoption Team in 8000+ company 🙂 :

• In our company we never enabled and promoted Storylines and Stories in Viva Engage. Our plan was to do so after we migrate to Native Mode, which we just finalised. During the last phase of transition to Native Mode, I was preparing some adoption material for our end users. I was very much inspired by your adoption materials here: https://adoption.microsoft.com/en-us/viva/engage/ - big kudos to your team for preparing such a good package. 
• What I discovered whilst first adoption meetings is that: it might be very confusing for end user perspective or someone new in Viva Engage what is the difference between the following tabs: Profile, Home feed, Communities, Storylines. It feels that it is too many entries and it is making it over-complicated for a standard user. Limiting it to 2 main + Inbox would be plenty. 

• You mentioned that we should proceed with adoption of those features.. I am not sure if it is the best approach seeing those feature being changed or removed at the end of the year. We will just waste user's time to learn something new and then suddenly change. It would be great if you could gives us indications about your plans, so we are clear with communicating them to our end users. Thanks so much for your time. 

I guess for our business we have been pretty late to the party on actually moving our Viva Engage to the connected experience. So Storylines is pretty much in early adopter mode and people are still coming to terms with what it is for and how they will use it. But great to get some heads up on whats going on in the Engage space!
Thanks for keeping us informed!

Flagging folks that this blog post has been updated. I strongly encourage you to consider enabling the stories preview this week, so that you can participate in the preview of our new media experiences. We're getting really great feedback--particularly from communicators--about how media "pops" in feeds.  But if you can't join the preview, we'll ship the final experience to general availability soon! Thanks for your patience and input!

Anna_Bolton What I would suggest for your launch is to disable Stories (unless you're on Premium) and focus instead on what Storyline is and what its purpose it, since at some point that UI treatment will be going away (again, unless you're on Premium).

While I do not think that Storyline will ever be a focus location for the platform, it does unlock many use cases for when users want to express themselves without requiring a community for that topic (or potentially to have them avoid "spamming" All Company or similar broad communities).

I can see how folks would confuse the My Profile (which shows your Storyline) and the Storyline tab which shows all Storylines.