In case you missed it, we recently hosted a webinar that showcased the upcoming roadmap for Viva Engage. During our discussion, we shared various aspects, from anticipated product updates, releases and feature enhancements. The Viva Engage roadmap recording and presentation highlights specific scenarios, key priorities, and showcased our dedication to staying ahead in a rapidly evolving market as well as listening to customer feedback.
Curious to try it out for your organization? Now would be a great time for you to trial our Viva Engage, experiencing firsthand the features and experiences we discussed during the webinar. The Viva Engage trial provides an excellent chance for you and your organization to explore how our offerings align with the company's vision of employee experience and how they can specifically address your needs and challenges. Fill out the form here and we will follow up with you to get started.
Here are some of the main points from the session below. We also included some questions that we didn't have time to answer live, but we wanted to follow up with you on them.
Publish directly from Amplify
We shared about being able to share publications from Amplify to Viva Engage communities and storyline posts. Communicators can create once and distribute where employees can react and respond.
Documentation:
Join the upcoming getting started with Amplify webinar
Viva Amplify Adoption Resources
Related Q&A:
Can Amplify see if specific employees or cohorts of employees (e.g. "employees in NY") have engaged in a campaign?
You can filter which employee sets (powered by Azure AD/Entra ID/ or now your own organizational data). We do not offer the ability to see analytics down to the specific individual.
Do emails sent via Amplify benefit from enhanced insights such as those available through email platforms like Poppulo? Including who has opened an email, clicked on links etc
Yes, it does include rich metrics across channels, site views, analytics over time, and other filterable metrics. Come to our webinar in December to learn more.
Has the rollout/release of Viva Amplify helped or hindered the adoption of Viva Engage? Heard in Ignite that most people said that Amplify was primarily being used to support email communications. Doesn't that counter the engagement agenda?
The ability to publish to Viva Engage from Amplify was recently announced at Ignite (landing in early 2024). We have heard from a lot of customers that this is a top request and there is a lot of excitement to be able to reach communities through Amplify.
Create effective and engaging communications in Viva Engage
Next, we dove into capabilities such as copilot in Engage, long form articles, and draft and schedule posts. Plus, we shared an update on our rich media experiences too.
Documentation:
What's new for Viva Engage (Ignite 2023)
Announcing Copilot in Viva Engage
Related Q&A:
What training material, or support, does Microsoft provide to help with prompt engineering for Copilot?
Copilot for Microsoft 365 – Microsoft Adoption - This is a great site! Start here, lots of resources! And check out this training content
Will the rise of AI capabilities to handle unstructured data lead to Viva Engage content being more easily surfaced and leveraged in Copilot?
AI + Copilot will certainly help highlight and connect knowledge in Answers/Engage. It will also bring in conversational themes as 'conversation starters'. We’re already using AI to help inform the home feed and also powers the sentiment analysis and theme extraction we provide via our analytics. We will continue to share about our thinking of AI and Copilot for Viva Engage content.
Are there any multi-lingual features for Articles? Ideally, it would be possible to publish a single article in multiple languages (not auto-translated, rather inserting professional translations) and the user's display language will dictate which language the article displays in. This helps so employees who speak different languages to interact with each other through the comments rather than having separate Articles for each language.
Right now, the full article will be translated if it’s posted in a different language than the user’s desired language setting. We’re not currently working on the ability to generate the original article in multiple languages.
Is there a way to check article post is accessible?
Articles will meet the same accessibility requirements as the rest of Viva Engage: Accessibility in Viva Engage - Microsoft Support
What benefit is articles if we already use SharePoint news? Our people are already confused over when to use what when!
Articles (i.e. long form posts) have been long requested by customers, especially the ability to embed media and code inline. Some customers will use a combination of articles and SharePoint news depending on content, shelf life and anticipated reach.
Can you syndicate Engage "Article" posts to other platforms e.g. a SharePoint site or some sort of email newsletter?
Syndicate, no, not at this time... but you could post from Amplify or send an announcement in Viva and it would send, and employees would be notified via an interactive email.
Sharing leaders' messages across multiple tenants organizations
After, we talked about the possibilities of sharing storyline conversations across tenants. Many of our customers have multiple instances of Azure AD and we can make it easier for leaders to communicate and measure the conversations at scale. Recently this experience has been made generally available. Leaders can post storyline announcements across multiple tenants and employees can consume content as if they resided in a single tenant. Additionally, conversation analytics will be supported as well as per tenant insights. Leadership corner will also include announcements made by leaders using the MTO capabilities.
Related Q&A:
I have heard MTO only will support up to 5 tenants. Is this accurate?
Yes, but work with your account team if an exception needs to be made.
Advanced analytics in Viva Engage
We dove headfirst into analytics showcasing the brand-new network analytics, audience analytics for leaders, personal analytics and new and updated conversation analytics that will show sentiment. We also showed a snapshot of the new employee retention stat that’s including in your network analytics.
Documentation:
View and manage analytics in Viva Engage
Analytics in Viva Engage (end user support)
Related Q&A:
Will the raw data for these analytics be available with existing license? I mean not as premium?
You can access data export from the admin center.
How and who accesses Network analytics?
More details here View and manage analytics in Viva Engage | Microsoft Learn
We need to be able to pick data ranges for data not just 7/28 days. Why can't we have that?
Custom date ranges are on our radar - no timeframe yet.
We have a use case where we want to see more detailed analytics on engage posts, including down to seeing which individuals read the post. Is something on your roadmap?
We don't currently have specific data on individual readership exposed within the reports. It is something that is being considered in Viva Amplify but nothing has been determined or decided.
We have been looking for a long time to find a good way to analyze engagement in a central place for Viva Engage. We now have looked at the leadership corner and this still only allows for "local" analytics and not really global. The scenario is that corp comms want a birds eye view of what communities and posts are most active. Are there any good powerBI templates or other solutions?
Advanced analytics (with Network analytics and deepened conversational analytics), are available with Viva licensing.
How can we simply see, in the last 30 days, which posts were "top" posts (most likes, most comments) ...I currently don't know an easy way to do that other than to manually scroll.
In the network analytics, admins can see trending conversations across specific date ranges.
What’s new and next for communities
In the world of communities, we are connecting Answers in Viva within communities. Find answers faster by typing a question and AI will suggest related questions that have been answered before. Plus, you’ll be able to get analytics on the impact of the community answers. Additionally, we are continuing to explore ways that other Viva apps integrate into Viva Engage. Stay tuned for more updates in the new year.
Documentation:
Overview and setup of Answers in Viva
Answers in Viva: Overview
What's new for Viva Engage (Ignite 2023)
Related Q&A:
Do you have some ROI data or potential savings using Answers?
Yes - we investigated the time taken to (a) find an expert and (b) get their attention. Usually this is done via email or maybe chat. At a conservative estimate, it takes an individual at least 15 mins to get an answer. By having an expert only have to answer a question once, that means each time a user finds the answers through the AI-suggested related posts your org is saving 15 mins at least. Also, that means you are saving your subject matter experts from being interrupted all the time with repeat questions. You’ll find this type of analytics within the Answers Analytics, at an individual level as well as at a global level. More about analytics available in Answers.
Updates coming for M365 customers and admins
We wrapped up with details about what’s new and next for M365 customers, including updates to rich media, expanded reactions, updated UI changes and more. Additionally, we shared the updates for the domain changes that will be coming in January 2024. Stay connected to the M365 Roadmap and message center posts for updates as these roll out.
Related Q&A:
Can we get the ability to adjust the time when the notifications emails go out? Be good to be able to set it to a time zone if nothing else?
This is something we are working on ... no ETA yet, but it's part of our work reviewing email digest and notifications in general. We understand the feedback! Check out the Viva Engage Explained: Notifications blog post.
Is there a plan to integrate the inbox with Teams chat to prevent information duplication?
Viva Engage is an app in Teams, and notifications from Engage are added into the activity feed. Additionally, admins can now disable private messages within Viva Engage. We are researching what's to come with Microsoft Teams! Stay tuned.
Trials, licenses and more with the new Viva Engage experiences
We answered questions for what’s included in existing licensing, what’s part of the Viva licensing and shared about ways you can trial Viva Engage experiences. Please work with your account teams as you determine the best fit for your organization as you build your business case for Viva Engage as part of your employee experience solutions.
• Trials Full tenant for all users in a tenant for 60-days
• Partial tenant for up to 50 users for 60-days (must be an admin to click/follow this link) Microsoft Viva Employee Communications and Communities Trial
Documentation:
Employee Experience Platform Plans and Pricing
Related Q&A:
How does Viva Communication and Community license improve things for the end user? All the enhancements seem to support leaders and communicators.
Experiences within leadership corner also benefit general employees by connecting them to their organizational goals, leaders, being able to participate in campaigns & AMAs. Additionally, employees get access to personal analytics, and other communication capabilities like draft & schedule posts, the new articles post type, contribute and benefit from Answers in Viva, and more to come soon.
Next Steps
Thanks for joining us and asking so many questions. Here’s the recording and slides:
If you have more questions or need more information, please follow up with your Microsoft Account team. Stay tuned to the blog for more updates, events, and more.