What does Microsoft Viva Mean for Internal Communicators

Viva Connections

Powered by SharePoint, Viva Connections is the curated, personalized news, conversations, and community updates for users packed with stories, live events, videos, and other content types.

Through Viva Connections, Microsoft Teams brings SharePoint and Yammer directly into your collaboration space. With this, the reach of your content  from SharePoint and Yammer is extended, allowing communicators and leaders to reach employees efficiently.

The exciting component is that you can customize your Viva Connections sites from within SharePoint. A powerful feature of boosting content is also available to make sure everyone is in the know about the most important information. You can set it to be pinned at the top until a certain date or till a certain number of impressions is reached.

Get Ready Viva Connection

Are you ready for MS Viva Connections? Here is what you need to do before starting with Viva Connections:

• Upgrade to SharePoint Online and conduct a content audit to remove any unwanted content and clean up the environment.
• Deploy a SharePoint Homes site. To reap the benefits of Viva Connections, setting up a Home Site is a requirement.
• Launch Yammer communities to build the feed for your Viva Connections.

Viva Topics

A knowledge management tool, driven by AI, to organize your content and news into categories, Viva Topics is powered by SharePoint Syntex. This application has the ability to turn content into knowledge by keeping employees from spending too much time searching or recreating content that already exists in the company.

Topics are categorized based on content, people, process, product, or customers, and have the ability to link to one another, like a wiki.

Get Ready for Viva Topics

Topic cards create an interactive experience and generate quick summaries of the subject. These even include alternative names, key people, topic resources and are security controlled so you won’t see topics you shouldn’t.

Viva Topics will be integrated into SharePoint, Microsoft Search, and Teams, with headlines in Outlook and built into Q&A experience to find answers or experts.

Viva Learning

Offering a simplified learning experience, right in the flow of work. Viva Learning aggregates from existing learning and development materials to develop their skills in the flow of work. It connects with LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn, and other third-party sources like Coursera and PluralSight.

Did you know learning can be manager assigned and you can track and manage progress as well?

Topic-based learning can be embedded in a Teams’ team to upskill everyone and you can set up a dedicated chat button in your MS Teams’ teams for learning!

Get Ready for Learning

To get started with Viva Learning, here is what you need to be ready with:

• Learning requires connections to existing learning and development sources so you’ll need to invest and configure those in advance.
• You should also look into preparing your own learning modules and upskill the organization in communications before integrating Viva Learning.

Viva Insights

Designed to help people make better use of their time by encouraging employees to plan focus hours, or unplug destress to prevent burnout. It combines personal insights and  emails from MyAnalytics and Workplace analytics for managers and leaders to give directional input.

It provides employees with guidance on productivity, process, and wellbeing. Viva Insights includes Headspace integration and can include insights from third-party applications too such as Zoom, Workday, and Success Factors.

Get Ready for Insights

Take a look at a few key consideration before you get started with Insights:

• Consider how you’ll communicate analytics access as these are powerful tools for both individuals and managers.
• You can think about adding the Viva Insights app to your MS Teams space now to start the learning experience.