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What’s new for Microsoft Viva – December 2023
December was a great month for Viva Engage, the employee engagement platform that helps you connect, communicate, and collaborate with your colleagues. There were a lot of new announcements and improvements made by Microsoft, which are probably the biggest batch of updates since Viva Engage was renamed from Yammer. You will be amazed by the new features and enhancements that will make your work experience more engaging, productive, and fun!
But that’s not all. There were also some relevant updates for Viva Goals, the goal management tool that helps you align your objectives and key results (OKRs) with your organization’s vision and strategy. Microsoft made some improvements to the application that will allow you to further customize and templatize your OKRs, making them more relevant, measurable, and achievable.
In this blog post, you will get a brief overview of the new features and improvements for Viva Engage and Viva Goals, and how they can benefit you and your organization. Hope you enjoy reading this post and learning more about what is new for Microsoft Viva!
DEC
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Communication Compliance – Empower end users to report inappropriate posts and comments in Viva Engage
Viva Engage
Microsoft Viva Engage users are empowered to report inappropriate or concerning posts and comments violating customers’ organizational policies within Viva Engage Team conversations. These reported posts are then submitted to a Communication Compliance policy for customers’ designated investigators with the appropriate role-based access control permissions to review and take action if deemed necessary.
DEC
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MyTopics for all users in a Topics tenant
Viva Topics
If your tenant has completed AI-indexing, a very small subset of topics will now be available to all users, even without an assigned Topics license. Any user in your organization will be able to view their associated “MyTopics” that appear in their “suggested” and “confirmed” connection webparts of Topic Center home, the Topic adaptive card for Viva Connections, and the People Profile card. They can confirm or remove these associations.
DEC
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Viva Goals – Roll out for Improved team settings experience
Viva Goals
As a part of this release Team owners will have a simplified team settings experience. In addition, Team owners will also have the ability to create custom time-periods by default. The organization owners will have the option in the organization admin page, to configure this custom time-period creation permissions for team owners.
Viva Goals – A Default company-wide organization will be available by January 2024
Viva Goals
A default company-wide organization will be available in Viva Goals to help users easily get started with Goals without going through the organization creation step. Viva Goals admins and IT admins will have control to change the default organization or turn it off.
MyTopics for all users in a Topics tenant
Viva Topics
If your tenant has completed AI-indexing, a very small subset of topics will now be available to all users, even without an assigned Topics license. Any user in your organization will be able to view their associated “MyTopics” that appear in their “suggested” and “confirmed” connection webparts of Topic Center home, the Topic adaptive card for Viva Connections, and the People Profile card. They can confirm or remove these associations.
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New designs for post types in Viva Engage
Viva Topics
Starting in December 2023, Viva Engage customers will see a refreshed design for question, praise, and poll post types.
The new design for post types in Viva Engage simplifies the user experience, putting more emphasis on content. The streamlined approach will be available in all endpoints—web, SharePoint, mobile apps, interactive Outlook emails, and the Engage apps in Outlook and Teams.
DEC
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Send Viva Goals email notifications from your own domain
Viva Goals
Email notifications from within Microsoft 365 are sent to users in various ways. Today, Viva Goals sends email notifications such as digest emails and sharing notifications from msft-viva-noreply@microsoft.com. Over the coming months, changes are coming for email senders. When users share goals from Viva Goals, these emails will be sent from the user. Emails such as digest emails that are generated by Viva Goals will support being sent from your domain if you have opted in to send email notifications from your domain in the Microsoft 365 admin center.
DEC
13
Expanded reactions in Viva Engage
Viva Engage
Viva Engage reactions help users participate in conversations. Reactions remain one of the most-used engagement features across customer networks. We’re offering a wider set of reactions in the product, like other M365 apps, to help everyone express themselves.
The new set adds 24 new icons to the existing six for a total of 30 reactions in Viva Engage. The current six reactions (like, love, laugh, celebrate, thank, sad) will see new additions, including icons to show laughter, support, checkmark confirmation, excitement, and more.
Viva Insights Feature Admin Controls: Reflection
Viva Insights
Microsoft added new capabilities for admins in Viva Insights: Admins can disable the Reflection feature for their tenant, individual users, or AAD groups and M365 Groups.
A new capability for admins offers more flexibility to manage user access to specific Insights features: to start with, Insights Admins can configure access to the Reflection feature. They can configure access at the tenant level, group level (using AAD groups or M365 Groups), or at the user level, for maximum flexibility.
New experiences for video and images in Viva Engage are coming to you in 2024!
Viva Engage
As a Viva Engage customer you will enjoy the new video and image experiences as soon as they reach general availability early in 2024—no action needed.
Microsoft Viva: Topics in Viva Engage
Viva Engage
Adding topics to posts in Viva Engage will default open for question post types and be aligned with new topic experiences as seen in Answers in Viva.
DEC
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Teams Channels announcements in Viva Connections
Viva Connections
If a Frontline worker (FLW) licensed user is @mentioned in a Teams channel announcement, the announcement will be displayed in Viva Connections so that the user can find all their important updates in a single place.
Create Goals Tab in Microsoft Teams Chats and Channels
Viva Goals
Users will be able to add Viva Goals as a tab in a Microsoft Teams chat or channel, so that they can see their goals in the flow of work.
DEC
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Add Images to Check-In Notes and Review Dashboards
Viva Goals
With this capability, users can attach images to check-in notes and dashboards in Viva Goals to better illustrate their ideas visually.
New goal sharing experience
Viva Goals
Facilitate effortless sharing of goals and goal progress with the enhanced sharing functionality in Viva Goals.
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Viva Engage Network Analytics
Viva Engage
Network analytics is coming to Viva Engage! In mid-January, admins and corporate communicators will be able to monitor organization-wide engagement via the network analytics dashboard. Additionally, a new control will be available on your Viva Engage admin dashboard in the Analytics and AI section that will enable you to activate summarization and theme extraction for your network with Microsoft Responsible AI protections, to assist users as they access network-wide data about employee engagement on the platform.
Copilot in Viva Engage
Viva Engage
Copilot is coming to Viva Engage! In mid-January, a new control will be available on your Viva Engage admin dashboard in the Analytics and AI section. This control will enable you to activate the preview of Copilot in Engage for all users with a premium license. Licensing requirements for these features post preview are yet to be confirmed.
DEC
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Viva Goals—Custom Check-In Templates
Viva Goals
Check-In templates will allow team owners and admins to specify a template for check-ins. Goal owners can use these templates when making check-ins on their goals.
Viva Goals—Goal Customization at Team Level
Viva Goals
This feature extends the Goals Terminology Customization capabilities to the team level. Now, team admins can use custom terminology to match their team’s Goal nomenclature and structure.
Viva Glint 360s
Viva Glint
Empower employees to collect 360 feedback for personal growth and development.
Goal Customization in Copilot in Viva Goals
Viva Goals
Enhancements to Viva Goals Copilot to better support customized terminology.
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Viva Goals – Enhanced Progress Tracking with Azure DevOps Integration
Viva Engage
Microsoft has announced the launch of Viva Engage community creation API beta endpoint on MS Graph: Use the Microsoft Graph API to work with Viva Engage (preview)
Many of our customers have requested this capability in the past to programmatically create communities instead of creation via Engage UI. We invite you to try this beta endpoint and provide us with feedback.
Viva Learning enables tagging content with interests and export content metadata
Viva Learning
We are excited to announce that Viva Learning now enables admins to tag content with interests to enhance recommendations and search relevance and also enables admins to export content metadata for offline review and analysis of the tags on content.
Updates to adding topics to posts in Viva Engage
Viva Engage
New developments to adding topics to posts within Answers in Viva are being extended to all topic experiences in Viva Engage (Yammer). Adding topics to posts helps improve the visibility, engagement, and organization of content.
These updates will help employees select a topic by providing more topics to choose from, coaching tips, and additional room for supporting topic information. Questions will also have the topics field open by default to help encourage the use of topics on questions and drive higher likelihood of a response.
Viva Engage: Answers in Communities
Viva Engage
Answers in Microsoft Viva lets people learn from each other by asking and answering questions. Now, if you have a premium license, you can use Answers in your Viva Engage communities.
DEC
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Microsoft Viva: Browser optimized playback for SuccessFactors content
Microsoft Viva
Desktop client content consumption for SuccessFactors content is enhanced with browser optimized playback.
Weekly Active User Reporting in Viva Learning
Viva Learning
Total number of unique users who have launched the Viva Learning personal app in the last 7 days.
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