What’s New in Orchestry (September 2023)

New Features

Kids are getting back to school and life is picking up pace, and so are we at Orchestry. September has been an incredibly busy month for all of us, but our Development team has kicked it up a few notches with a massive collection of new features and functionality they ideated, built, tested, and deployed. 

Viva Engage Provisioning

You heard it right. Orchestry now offers Viva Engage template creation and provisioning capabilities. But what does that mean? Until recently, Orchestry users could leverage a library of pre-build Microsoft Teams and SharePoint templates or build their own bespoke ones.

With the latest Orchestry product release, we are thrilled to offer our customers the ability to create and deploy Viva Engage templates to their users leveraging our incredibly powerful and user-friendly provisioning engine. 

Viva Engage is gaining popularity as an employee engagement, culture, and community-building tool. More and more organizations are starting to leverage it for a variety of use cases. As with many employee engagement tools, autonomy of usage is imperative to get people excited about actually using it. This is why Orchestry's controlled self-service provisioning of Viva Engage has been such a hit with our customers and partners already.

You can read more about this new and much-awaited functionality in our blog. 

Viva Engage Insights

On top of Viva Engage provisioning we wanted to give our customers and partners all the insights into them they already get for Microsoft Teams and SharePoint sites. 

Orchestry customers and partners are now able to see all existing and newly created Viva Engage communities in workspace insights. Without having to dig through a single Admin Center, they can easily access details like:

1. The total number of Viva Engage Communities in the tenant.
2. The full list of Viva Engage Communities with the date they were created and the number of days since the last activity.
3. The template that was used to create each individual Community.
4. The details about the person who originally requested the Viva Engage community.
5. The amount of storage used by the Community.
6. Whether it is private or public.
7. All the policies applied to the Community (more about this shortly).
8. Whether Guest access is enabled.
9. Information about users, including the number of Owners, Members, and Guests (if allowed).

For ease of management, Viva Engage Community insights in Orchestry have quick links to the SharePoint site, Community documents, and Azure AD admin. 

Viva Engage Automated Archiving 

When we first demonstrated the Viva Engage Provisioning functionality to a group of Orchestry's customers and partners, the very first question (right after "this is incredibly cool" comments) was - "Are you going to offer lifecycle management and automated archiving capabilities for them as well?". 

Many of you may be familiar with a ridiculously powerful functionality of Orchestry - automated archiving of Microsoft Teams and SharePoint sites.

Orchestry admins can easily create robust automated archiving policies including 2-step archiving and apply them to Teams and SharePoint sites. This functionality not only reduces the burden of managing M365 workspaces for the IT team but also helps effectively keep content sprawl in check. 

Naturally, hearing how adamant our customers were about implementing this functionality for Viva Engage Communities, we set out on the mission to get it done.

Creating Viva Engage archiving policies is a piece of cake with only a couple of steps to configure. Once the policy is created, the admins can assign it in bulk to all or some existing Viva Engage Communities and apply them to Viva Engage templates. 

Viva Engage Directory Support

Workspace Directory has always been one of the more understated features of Orchestry, yet one of the most loved ones by end users. 

It allows end users to easily search all Teams and SharePoint sites within a single directory, and with very little effort. Most users appreciate how much the Directory improves findability of workspaces as well as transparency,  and actually inherently reduces duplication of workspaces.

Now Viva Engage Communities are available and accessible in Orchestry's Workspace Directory, so end users can easily search and access them.

Everything you wanted to know about Viva Engage

Orchestry dedicated the month of September to publishing a whole collection of engaging content about Viva Engage.

• What is Viva Engage? M365 New Employee Experience Tool - If you've been around the Microsoft 365 suite of tools, you might have wondered - what is Viva Engage? Well, with this article you're in the right place. Read on to learn more about what Viva Engage IS and what Viva Engage DOES.

• Viva Engage vs Yammer: The Evolution - If you've been wondering, What is Viva Engage in Teams, or how it relates to Yammer, this article is your one-stop guide.

• Viva Engage vs Teams: Navigating the Microsoft 365 Maze - Read this article to find the answer to the question - Viva Engage vs Teams - which should I use?

• 26 Virtual Employee Engagement Use Cases for Viva Engage - Our article dives into 26 standout ways companies are rocking their Viva Engage communities.

• Empowering Employees with Viva Engage: Beyond IT Gatekeepers - Discover how Viva Engage revolutionizes virtual employee engagement, empowering teams and reshaping the digital workspace.
  

• Viva Engage Community Templates in Orchestry - This article dives into how Orchestry simplifies the creation, management, and discoverability of Microsoft Viva Engage Communities.