Microsoft Viva Launched to Assist in Remote Work

Sieeka Khan, Tech Times 04 February 2021, 01:02 pm

Microsoft's new push for helping businesses with remote work and a massive bet on the new normal is emphasized with Microsoft Viva.

The Microsoft Viva is made to act as a portal for both employees and businesses to navigate the complexities of working from home. Microsoft is set to launch Viva on February 4, with parts of the platform to roll out all year.

Microsoft Viva platform

Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, stated that they have participated in the largest remote work experiment that the world has seen. Nadella underlined almost 11 months of a pandemic that has changed how people work, learn and socialize.

Microsoft Viva is not an app and it is not a service, it is more of a platform for improving remote work and helping businesses adjust to the new norm, according to TechCrunch.

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While businesses are now spending billions of dollars every year on employee wellbeing, Microsoft thinks that Viva will soon help in this digital era of work.

New era of remote work

Microsoft Viva is made for this flexible and digital era of work, it integrates into Microsoft Teams and works rather like the intranet of old by collecting essential parts of a business into a central location. Microsoft is dividing Viva into four modules: insights, connections, learning and topics.

The connections includes internal communications, or resources such as benefits and company policies. It is also made to be the portal that people can head to if they need to start working at a company and they have never met their co-workers because of the lockdowns.

Viva Connections is created on top of Microsoft's SharePoint technology, and it will include things like company news, employee resource groups, communities and town halls. It is basically a dashboard for connecting with colleagues remotely. It will be available in public preview on Teams desktop starting in the first half of 2021, with mobile app coming later this year.

Viva is Microsoft's next step after the controversial Productivity Score feature. Microsoft was criticized for allowing managers to drill into the data of the employees through metadata collected from its software and services.

The company was immediately forced to make changes to its Productivity Score, and Viva Insights includes similar data-driven insights for both the managers and employees.

Microsoft stated that Viva Insights will include data for managers and leaders to monitor work trends as well as patterns, but that type of privacy will be protected.

Viva Learning is Microsoft Viva’s third module, which is about employee learning and development.This is where the employers will house courses, training materials and other content for employee education.

These courses will include content from Microsoft Learn, LinkedIn Learning and the own content of the business, alongside training material from third-party providers, according to The Verge.

The last module that is inside Viva is Topics. It is a Wikipedia for the organization. It also uses AI to organize content and automatically surfaces topic cards with videos, documents and related people. Viva Topics will also generate topic cars from apps like Teams, Office and SharePoint.

Viva Topics is available as an add-on to Microsoft 365 commercial subscriptions. There will be a public preview of Viva Insights on February 4 as an app for Teams, which includes includes Personal, Manager and Leader insights. Microsoft is also launching a private preview of Viva and they plan to announce more additions to Microsoft Viva all year.

Personal Insights is available in public preview for end-users who have Exchange Online starting February 4. Manager and Leader insights are available in preview for customers with Workplace Analytics, which is available as an add-on to Microsoft 365 commercial subscriptions.