Viva Engage!

Things have changed in the modern workplace in the last few decades. More and more organizations run hybrid scenarios, where they are only in the office a couple of days a week, and some have all employees work fully remotely. This can be an awesome convenience and lead to higher levels of productivity. However, there are also many negatives associated with it due to the lack of connection in-person with other employees. This makes it more important than ever to have a way to engage and connect with employees that integrate with their suite of services. A few years ago, Microsoft introduced Yammer to its ecosystem, fostering this connection and collaboration. 

Now, Microsoft has released an even more intuitive and engaging experience powered by yammer that integrates directly into Microsoft Teams and it’s called Viva Engage. This article mentions Yammer/Viva Engage in this context, as Viva Engage administration is done in the Yammer Administration Center.

Work Collaboration

Studies have shown that workers are more productive when they feel more engaged in their workplace. But, with the shift to a greater percentage of the workforce being remote, this has proved challenging. Especially in the last few years, social media services like Twitter and Facebook have become popular. However, these services often have content unsuitable for work and may be offensive to some people or cause issues. So, how does an organization foster this collaboration in a secure and appropriate way?

Enter Yammer and Viva Engage….

Yammer – What is it?

Yammer is basically defined as a collaboration platform for internal and possibly external users. Functioning much the same as social media platforms like Facebook, it allows employees to Create Communities and customize their own profiles. Yammer also makes it easy to send out announcements to the whole company for Users from Leadership teams. Where it differs from public social media, is that enterprise-grade security and content moderation tools are integrated directly into the service. This allows system administrators to administrate the users and content in an easy way and prevent the common pitfalls associated with social media. Viva Engage builds upon this by adding the integration directly into Microsoft Teams….

Viva Engage Features

Viva Engage is an app that is deployed within Microsoft Teams (this can be targeted toward a specific user or group). Directly from the Teams UI users can create Communities to collaborate as a team or on a specific project.  Users all have their own Storyline they can post ideas and all kinds of things to share with coworkers. Viva Engage also makes it incredibly easy to have Company-wide announcements or team announcements from management. There are even engagement opportunities for employees to post questions for leadership. This app also offers an enhanced virtual event offering to get folks engaging like they were in an all-hands meeting at HQ.

Viva Engage Licensing

Now as you are reading this, I am sure you are asking yourself, “Sounds great, but how much will this cost me for all this?”.

The good news is if you already have Microsoft E3-E5 licensing, the Viva Engage Core Services, and Yammer are already included!

The enhanced “Ask me Anything” events, creating organization campaigns, and some other features are licensed as an add-on on the Viva Suite, which does incur an additional cost, but also many, many additional features.

More information can be found on Microsoft’s Viva Pricing Page

Initial Deployment

Check out our accompanying demon on deploying Viva Engage on our new YouTube channel!

Best Practices for Security and Administration

After deploying this for many customers, here are a few tips for a setup that will save you some headaches along the way:

1. Always align the Yammer/Viva Engage Network in native mode for Microsoft 365. This allows us to ensure access is secure using production credentials. If there is a Yammer installation already with data, it is still best to run the migration tool and set this up.
2. Step 2 of a successful deployment is going to be to block users without a Yammer License in Microsoft 365. This allows us to release it to only a select group of users for initial standardization and a staged release. This can greatly help smoothly with the transition to using this actively.
3. Always Hide all Company Groups, except for select Administration or HR users, this will prevent a random user from sending a full email blast to the entire company, as this group includes all Yammer/Viva Engage users are included in this group by default.
4. Develop a notification strategy, with Viva Engage, things can get out of hand quickly and it can turn into quite a distraction.