What’s new for Microsoft Viva – February 2023
February 2023 will be forever remembered as the month Viva Engage replaced Yammer 😄 with a lot of announcements being made Viva Engage, Viva Topics and Viva Learning were the application that received more innovations.
To learn about everything announced for Microsoft Viva in the last 28 days, check out the details of this article.
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“Projects” in Viva Goals is changing to “Initiatives”
Viva Goals
To align deeper with the OKR methodology, “Projects” in Viva Goals is renamed to “Initiatives”. In addition to changing the default terminology to Initiatives, Viva Goals will also be introducing the ability for organization admins to customize the term to a term of your choosing.
Standard Release: We will begin rolling out mid-February 2023 and expect to complete by late February 2023.
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Take action after reflecting on meeting category insights in Viva Insights
Viva Insights
Viva Insights customers will be able to take actions such as editing meeting invites or responses directly from the Viva Insights app after reflecting on their meeting category insights to align their time spent in meetings with their goals.
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Updates to Viva Insights Teams and Web App
Viva Insights
Microsoft is consolidating the Viva Insights app in Teams and on Microsoft365.com into four tabs: Home, Wellbeing, Productivity, and Teamwork. Microsoft is also updating the design, modifying the navigation, adding new insights and recommendations for qualifying managers, changing how we define teams, and bringing over some functionality from the now-retired MyAnalytics dashboard.
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Viva Connections Administration in Microsoft Admin Center
Viva Connections
Centralized IT administration of Viva Connections experiences along with home sites within the Microsoft Viva admin experience in M365 admin center.
Viva Connections for Android tablet
Viva Connections
Microsoft Viva Connections is your gateway to a modern engagement experience designed to keep everyone engaged and informed. This release brings the experience of Viva connections to Android tablet, thus extending the set of devices you can access it on.
Topic Activities on topic experiences
Viva Topics
Viva Topics helps you stay updated on topics of interest by bringing AI and human activities on the topics including topic updates, conversations and more to experiences across M365.
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Viva Connections is Available on iPad
Viva Connections
Viva connections is being released to a new form factor – iPad (tablet).
Notifications in Teams activity feed in Viva Goals
Viva Goals
User can now receive notifications for Viva Goals check-in reminder, mentions, and repliesto your comments within your Teams activity feed.
Bot support for building Viva Connections Cards
Viva Connections
Developers can leverage the power of Microsoft bot framework to build cards for Viva Connections.
Verified Viva Topics badges
Viva Topics
Users can now mark published topics as verified and add a specific group of SMEs as editors to the topic. Verification helps readers identify topics with added reliability. Topics that are verified are identified by a special badge and indicate the content is reviewed for accuracy and are regularly updated by assigned editors.
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Share Viva Goals OKRs directly to teams chats/channels
Viva Goals
Users can now copy and paste links to OKRs in Teams chats and channels, and the links will automatically be replaced to display a card with OKR details.
Custom Topic Types for Viva Topics
Viva Topics
Knowledge Managers can define and edit custom topic types that can offer important context on the nature of the topic entity.
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Yammer is evolving into Viva Engage
Viva Engage
Microsoft announced the intention to rebrand Yammer into Viva Engage in order to provide a consistent and delightful experience to our customers. This change will happen across all existing Yammer surfaces– including web, mobile, and integrations (Embed, SharePoint and Outlook) and will occur throughout 2023. In the coming months you can expect Yammer to become Viva Engage through the update of brand elements like logo, app icon and name.
The first stage of this rebrand happened last year with the rebranding of the Yammer Communities app for Teams into Viva Engage. The rest of rebrand will occur incrementally, starting with the mobile apps (iOS & Android) and the Communities app for Outlook updating their app icons and name in March 2023. We will communicate other endpoints like the web and embed experiences as we make progress. We will continue sending message center alerts and provide details and resources to help your organization understand, prepare, and communicate these changes.
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Social campaigns in Viva Engage
Viva Engage
Corporate communicators can create official hashtags for campaigns that inspire participation and aggregate campaign activity with following, leader sponsorship, theming, and supporting resources.
Storyline Announcements
Viva Engage
Official leaders can create ‘announcement’ storyline posts that reach their audience directly in email and Teams notifications. Post on behalf of another user allows the user to assign a delegate who can post to their storyline on their behalf.
Ask me anything events
Viva Engage
All users can create moderated Q&A events from their storyline page. AMAs include question upvoting & sorting, best answer, and optional anonymous submission.
Adding Viva Goals team members through AAD Groups
Viva Goals
With this capability, team admins can add members to teams by selecting AAD Groups (SG, DLs, etc.); This will enable roll outs and deployment across all teams as well as multiple group support at an organizational level.
Trending Topics
Viva Topics
Viva Topics brings a new way to discover and learn about important and relevant topics in your organization through the trending topics experiences across M365.
Editors cohort for topics
Viva Topics
Knowledge managers can now select and assign a group of SMEs to a topic and invite them to validate and contribute to suggested, confirmed and published topics.
Topics bot brings you topic information to your Teams chat
Viva Topics
Microsoft is introducing an exciting new way to interact with Topics. A new Teams bot for Viva Topics to bring important topic related information, activities and more to users on their Teams chat.
Topic level metrics on topic experiences
Viva Topics
View the topic level impact, impressions and usage on topic card and page experiences.
Viva Goals EU Data Residency
Viva Goals
With EU Data Residency support, EU-based customers interested in using Viva Goals can have their data stored in EU Data centers. Currently, EU Data Residency is available for new customer. With this change, for existing Viva Goals EU customers, the data will be migrated to EU Data centers.
GCCH support for Connections
Viva Connections
Viva connections will be made available for Government Community Cloud High.
Progress tracking for Learning paths
Viva Learning
Now in Viva Learning, users will be able to track their progress on different courses within the Learning path.
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Topic Discovery Analytics to Show Sites Processed
Viva Topics
This update will provide transparency on topic discovery through analytics, by showing the Sites processed counts in Microsoft Admin center.
SharePoint or tenant Admins will have access to Sites Processed analytics in Microsoft 365 Admin center. This will help Admins be aware of SharePoint sites being processed for Topics discovery to inform Knowledge Managers when they can begin reviewing Topics.
Self-service trial experience available for Viva Goals
Viva Goals
In March, individual users in your organization will be able to sign up for a self-service trial of Viva Goals from the website. This self-service experience allows individuals and teams to try Viva Goals with no requirement to input payment information, while providing complete visibility and control to their Microsoft 365 admin.
Previously, only admin-initiated trials of Viva Goals were available, which were limited to one trial per tenant. Customers told us they wanted a way for multiple departments across their organization to try Viva Goals at the same time. To meet this demand, we’re launching self-service trials.
SharePoint content on Office.com and Edge New Tab Page Feed show related Viva Topics
Viva Topics
Feed items are highlighted with a Topic Pill when they have relevant SharePoint content allowing the user to further contextualize their Feed.
Yammer conversations and Q&A appears on Topic Card as Activity
Viva Topics
Yammer conversations and Q&A which are associated to a topic appear on the Topic Card as new activity.
Additional filters for search results in Viva Learning
Viva Learning
Viva learning will be supporting more Filters on Language, Content Type and Source fields in Search results page.
Increased Viva Goals text customization
Viva Goals
Support for a wide range of text formatting options with additional capabilities to add tables and hyperlinks to OKR descriptions, check-ins and other updates.
Take Action on Meeting Category Insights in the Viva Insights app in Teams and on the web
Viva Insights
Categories in Outlook and Teams allow users to easily tag and label calendar events. Users can get insights on the time they spend per meeting category in the Viva Insights app in Teams. Using meeting category insights, they can see how their meeting time is distributed (percentage breakdown), how that has changed (meeting trends), and details about each of their meetings contributing to their categories (meeting details). An upcoming update to this feature will allow users to take actions on these meetings to align their time spent in meetings with their goals. These actions include viewing/editing meeting invites, cancelling, declining, and categorizing/recategorizing.
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Microsoft Graph Search API returns Topic
Viva Topics
Microsoft Graph Search API returns Topic answer details.
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Configure permissions by security group
Viva Learning
Admins can configure user permissions for learning content by security groups.
Manage user level information
Viva Learning
Admin function to download, retrieval & delete user level information regarding manual course completion tagging.
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Configure Viva Learning permissions by provider
Viva Learning
Admins can configure permission settings for Viva Learning content by learning provider, ie. hide all content from a certain connected learning provider from certain users.
Manual course completion
Viva Learning
Users can mark a course as complete in Viva learning.
Add to Calendar
Viva Learning
Add to Calendar feature will help the learners block learning time in their calendar to take up any course at their preferred time.
Employee learning API – learner record sync
Viva Learning
Assignments and learner records sync from providers/LMS connected to Viva Learning through the employee learning API.
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Jira on prem support for Viva Goals
Viva Goals
Support for Jira Server and Jira Data Center that allows users to automatically track the progress for objectives and key results (OKRs) along with the work driving those OKRs in Viva Goals.
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Viva Goals Administrator role for IT admins
Viva Goals
Global Admins will now be able to assign a new role called ‘Viva Goals Administrator’ to the IT admins who are tasked with managing Viva Goals policy settings for the company.
Expanded Viva Goals Analytics Feature
Viva Goals
Viva Goals Analytics now includes actionable insights and recommendations expanded to team admins, OKR Champions, and organization admins.
Topics engagement analytics in Topic center
Viva Topics
Usage and engagement analytics showing Topics adoption and value will be available to knowledge managers in a new analytics tab in Topic center. Analytics will include Unique users and Usage counts for Topics usage activities all up; Unique users and Usage counts for Topics for consuming, contributing and sharing Topics activities; Usage count details for Topics consumption activities from Topic card, page, search, Topic center cards; Usage count details for Topics for contribution activities like Editing and publishing topics, providing feedback.
Feature Access Management
Viva Engage
Admins will have the ability to enable or disable designated Viva Engage features for specific users through the M365 admin center.
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Increased Functionality and Terminology Change of Team Field
Viva Goals
Viva Goals currently has a field named “type” while creating and filtering OKRs which designates where the OKR would be created. The terminology is now changing from “type” to “teams.” In addition to the name change, the functionality of the “teams” field will expand to include additional context and faster search capability as OKR owners assign a team to an OKR.
All OKRs created from the My OKRs page will now be set to unassigned by default. OKRs being created from a specific team or organization page will continue to have the current default of the selected team or the organization.
Search relevance improvements in Viva Learning
Viva Learning
Improvements to relevancy of search results in Viva Learning including attribute boosting, spell correction, exact match, and personalized results based on interests.
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Start Configuring Viva Engage in the new Engage admin experience
Viva Engage
The Viva Engage experience has now arrived! You can discover this experience through search by searching for Viva, or Engage, as well as navigate to the experience via the setup tab, and then click on the Viva Collection. From the Viva suite page admins can navigate to the Viva engage app page where admins can begin their Viva Engage deployment process.
Send Praise from your Viva Connections Dashboard
Viva Connections
Site owners/authors can add the Praise card from Microsoft Insights on the Viva Connections dashboard, allowing employees to send out praises to their colleagues.
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