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.

Microsoft Viva updtes

FEB

2

“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.

Read More

FEB

6

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.

Read More

FEB

7

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.

Read More

FEB

8

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

FEB

10

Viva Connections is Available on iPad

Viva Connections

Viva connections is being released to a new form factor – iPad (tablet).

Read More

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.

Read More

Bot support for building Viva Connections Cards

Viva Connections

Developers can leverage the power of Microsoft bot framework to build cards for Viva Connections.

Read More

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.

Read More

FEB

13

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

FEB

14

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.

Read More

FEB

15

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

Topic level metrics on topic experiences

Viva Topics

View the topic level impact, impressions and usage on topic card and page experiences.

Read More

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.

Read More

GCCH support for Connections

Viva Connections

Viva connections will be made available for Government Community Cloud High.

Read More

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.

Read More

FEB

16

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

FEB

17

Microsoft Graph Search API returns Topic

Viva Topics

Microsoft Graph Search API returns Topic answer details.

Read More

FEB

20

Configure permissions by security group

Viva Learning

Admins can configure user permissions for learning content by security groups.

Read More

Manage user level information

Viva Learning

Admin function to download, retrieval & delete user level information regarding manual course completion tagging.

Read More

FEB

22

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.

Read More

Manual course completion

Viva Learning

Users can mark a course as complete in Viva learning.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

FEB

23

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.

Read More

FEB

24

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

FEB

27

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

FEB

28

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.

Read More

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.

Read More


No comments yet

Leave a Reply


I've been working with Microsoft Technologies over the last ten years, mainly focused on creating collaboration and productivity solutions that drive the adoption of Microsoft Modern Workplace.

%d bloggers like this: