Microsoft’s Teams suite was one of 2020’s biggest success stories, having raked in more than 75 million daily active users as national lockdowns forced greater parts of worldwide economies to work from home where possible. Now, the company has introduced a new platform, dubbed Viva, to capitalise on that success.
Viva is envisioned to be a portal for employees and businesses that will integrate into Teams. Specifically, Viva offers features across four modules including connections, insights, topics, and learning.
“We have participated in the largest at-scale remote work experiment the world has seen, and it has had a dramatic impact on the employee experience,” Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, said in a press release. “Every organization will require a unified employee experience from onboarding and collaboration to continuous learning and growth. Viva brings together everything an employee needs to be successful, from day one, in a single, integrated experience directly in Teams.”
Connections is built on top of SharePoint, and is used to host items such as company news, town halls, or resource groups. Insights contains tools for leaders and managers to monitor work patterns and trends.
Learning, as its name implies, hosts content from LinkedIn Learning and Microsoft Learning as well as user-generated content from businesses that opt to use the tool. Lastly, Topics is a wiki which automatically generates topic cards and context from platforms such as Office, Teams, and SharePoint.
The entire bid is what Microsoft determines as a means to target a $300 million USD marketplace that can combat the fragmentation of the workplace as more and more employees around the world opt for a hybridized work style.
Viva has already launched in part, wherein Topics is available to Microsoft 365 subscribers, and additional features will launch throughout the year.
What are your thoughts? Can Microsoft take meaningful steps to unify remote and in-vivo workforces? Be sure to let us know in the comments below.
