Microsoft Viva – A new business platform

Microsoft today introduced the new Microsoft Viva platform, which builds on the capabilities of Teams and Microsoft 365 and is split into four distinct features. It is a new Employee Experience Platform (EXP).

Microsoft will start rolling Viva today in preview, and will update frequently.

The Redmond software giant is obviously interested in expanding its market pretense, which already increased due to the ongoing pandemic. The new Viva platform is yet another step in this direction, and  “Employee Experience Platform”.

The idea of Viva is to create a unified the employee experience in these four key areas: Engagement, Wellbeing, Learning, and Knowledge. For that, there are four components.

• Viva Connections offers a personalized portal to your digital workplace, through which employees can access internal communication and company resources such as guidelines and benefits and participate in communities such as employee resource groups - all via a single customizable app in Microsoft Teams.
• Viva Insights provides individuals, managers, and executives with personalized and actionable insights that will help everyone in an organization thrive. Personal experiences and insights that are only visible to the employee help to organize his time for regular breaks, concentrated work and learning and to strengthen relationships with colleagues.
• Viva Learning makes training and further education offers more recognizable and accessible in the workflow. It bundles all learning resources available to an organization in one place. This includes content from LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn, third-party providers such as Skillsoft, Coursera, Pluralsight and edX as well as an organization's own content library.
• Viva Topics offers a knowledge experience that helps people connect with information and experts across the company. Viva Topics uses AI to analyze a customer's Microsoft 365 data and is able to integrate knowledge from a variety of third-party services such as ServiceNow and Salesforce.

Certainly, Microsoft Viva is an interesting service for existing customers. On the other hand, it can be very attractive to other companies and make them switch to Microsoft services, which is the main goal of the company. Time will tell how successful will be this approach.

Links can be found in this tweet.