Microsoft’s new employee experience platform, Viva, is a solution that partner Content + Cloud has been anticipating for a long time, according to Steve Goodman, Principal Technology Strategist.

The tech giant launched Viva earlier this year. It is a platform that combines various tools for employee wellbeing, engagement, learning, and knowledge discovery. Viva also integrates Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 with a selection of tools for employee engagement and experience.

The platform is comprised of four segments to promote employees’ welfare and wellbeing: Viva Connections, Viva Insights, Viva Learning, and Viva Topics.

It is Connections, in particular, that has excited Goodman.

“Viva Connections has been the thing that we’ve been waiting for a very long time,” he told UC Today.

“With Viva Connections, Microsoft is saying ‘This is great, you should deploy this, and we’ll bring your intranet in’. But most people don’t have a modern, fully functional, SharePoint intranet, which requires expertise from information architects who understand how to structure everything inside your organisation to surface it so people can easily browse and find that information.

“Our own Fresh intranet platform has 95 percent of all that already done and bookcases what Microsoft is doing, which is really paying off for us.”

The integration of the Viva platform into Teams adds value to the latter’s proposition, as it encourages organisations to explore and use the features in Teams, as opposed to just using it as a simple video or chat platform, Goodman added.

“As a Microsoft partner, you don’t want your customer to look at the likes of Zoom and say, ‘We just use Teams for meetings, so we could move over to another product quite,” he elaborated.

“But the reason a company would choose to move is not that the product is bad, but rather they haven’t used Teams properly or explored all of its features. To provide value inside Microsoft Teams, then you’ve got to have things that people find useful. So by bringing in Viva they’ve now got a platform that’s going to be the place where they see their intranet, rather than having to go somewhere else”

Viva also offers SMBs an easier way for management to engage with employees and gauge their wellbeing and productivity, especially if organisations adopt a hybrid working model. This allows smaller businesses to get better oversight of the overall operations of the company, Goodman said.

“A recurring ask by smaller customers is when they’re thinking about intranets and surfacing that information in Teams,” he stated.

“One of the benefits of Teams is that it reduces the number of different tools inside Microsoft 365 that people need to know they just need to know what they want to do. That simplification and reduced explanations are key for those smaller organisations.

“On the enterprise side, some customers will see the immediate value in Viva Topics because perhaps they’ve been trying to organise their information in a straightforward way for years – either buying tools to do it or enforcing rules – and they often spend vast sums of money to do so.”

 

 



from UC Today https://ift.tt/3ycqOBt