Today at Microsoft Ignite, we announced new experiences in Viva Engage designed to help connect employees and take employee experience to the next level, including Copilot in Viva Engage which leverages AI to help create timely, relevant, and engaging posts. But there’s even more new value coming to Microsoft Viva suite and communications customers, specifically for communications and communities. Here’s a full briefing on the latest news.
Deepening Viva Integration
Copilot in Viva Engage is coming soon: Earlier this year, we shared how Copilot will assist in authoring posts. Now, we are excited to announce that Copilot in Viva Engage will land in public preview in January 2024. Learn more about what’s planned for Copilot across Viva.
Publish from Viva Amplify to Viva Engage: Viva Amplify is now generally available. And coming soon in 2024, you’ll be able to publish directly from Amplify to Viva Engage communities and storylines. It will also incorporate content shared to Engage within reports in Viva Amplify.
Viva Goals and Viva Engage integration: As companies set their strategy and priorities, this integration bring their mission, alignment and results directly into communities, making it easier to build communities around goals and view goal progress from Viva Goals directly in Viva Engage.
Multiple pinned conversations: Pin more than one conversation in a community to ensure people see critical communications.
Viva Goals and multiple Pinned Conversations in Viva Engage communities.
Powering Communication
Multi-tenant organization (MTO) communications: Many organizations find themselves in complex scenarios through mergers, acquisitions, spinoffs, and other reasons that require separate entities and/or multiple tenants. Viva Engage now supports communication across multiple tenants to make it easier for leaders to communicate and engage at across these tenants. Leaders can send announcements and storyline announcements to multiple tenants. This capability is now generally available.
A storyline announcement shared across tenants. Labels are used to identify which tenant an employee is posting from.
People can engage with the leader’s announcements directly on the post, including replies, comments, reactions, and of course, analytics.
Labels show which tenant each employee is from.
Articles
Articles are a new post type coming to Viva licensed customers in early 2024. With Articles, you or a delegate can post long-form content and newsletters into Viva Engage and apply formatting and styling to improve the design and readability of the content.
Articles will soon be a new type of post.
An enhanced editing experience offers more control and the ability to preview how the article will appear.
Report conversations with Communication Compliance
In any platform where leaders and employees can openly express themselves and seek knowledge, it becomes crucial that we provide mechanisms to enable our customers to drive respectful conversations within Engage. In an effort to further strengthen moderation capabilities, we are integrating Microsoft Purview's Communication Compliance to manage user-reported conversations from Viva Engage. This will help investigators address user reported incidents effectively through enhanced moderation capabilities.
Connecting people to knowledge
AI assisted knowledge in Answers: Sharing knowledge is critical for high-performing organizations. And new capabilities in Answers in Viva leverages AI to generate questions and answers from existing files and import them into Answers. Also, AI will automatically route open questions to people who might have the answer. Users can also identify the right topics for a question, see top related responses before publishing, and help in routing questions over to experts.
Enable Answers in Communities
Answers is coming to communities! Set the default style of a community to be enable Answers in communities to help highlight knowledge, show related questions, and save people time.
An Answers community in Viva Engage helps people find the information they need.
More Analytics
Network Analytics: Want to understand what’s happening and what’s trending across your network? Network Analytics help you measure adoption, understand how employees are interacting with each other, and gauge which platforms and conversations are driving engagement.
Sentiment analysis and themes show trends and spotlight conversations to identify opportunities. We’re also bringing sentiment analysis and theme analysis to Conversation Analytics to help creators better understand the impact of their messages. We’re also adding platform activity to see how content is performing within Teams, Outlook, or Engage.
These improvements are part of advanced analytics and available to Viva suite and Employee Communications & Communities customers.
Sign up for the Viva Engage Roadmap Webinar!
Join the Viva Engage team on Monday, Nov 20 at 8 AM PT, as we go beyond Ignite and share what's new and next for Viva Engage. We will be showcasing tools and capabilities for corporate communicators, leaders, community managers, and power users. We’ll also cover Viva Engage licensing options and how to get signed up for a trial to see the latest features firsthand.
Register here https://aka.ms/VivaEngage/Roadmap/Webinar23
Can’t make it? Don’t worry, the recording will be posted and shared after the event.
A lot of new features are rolling out in the coming weeks, so keep an eye on your network and this blog where we’ll explore these solutions in depth.
- Murali Sitaram
Murali is a Corporate Vice President for Viva Engage + Viva Goals