Microsoft Viva is Microsoft’s new push for helping businesses with remote work and a big bet on this new way of life becoming the norm. It’s designed to act as a portal for both employees and businesses to navigate the complexities of working from home. Microsoft is launching Viva today, with parts of the platform rolling out throughout 2021.
“We have participated in the largest, at scale, remote work experiment the world has seen,” says Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, underlining nearly 11 months of a pandemic that has reshaped how people work, learn, and live. “As the world recovers, there is no going back. Flexibility in when, where, and how we work will be key.”
VIDEO Microsoft Viva isn’t an app or even a service but more of a platform for improving remote work and helping businesses adjust to it. While businesses collectively spend billions of dollars each year on employee wellbeing, Microsoft thinks Viva will help in this new digital era of work.
“We need to stop thinking about work as a place, and start thinking about how to maintain the culture, connect employees, and harness human ingenuity in a hybrid world,” says Jared Spataro, head of Microsoft 365. Spataro was quick to predict early on in the pandemic that it would forever change the way we work and learn, and Microsoft Viva is clearly the result of trends Microsoft has been witnessing.
Designed for this new flexible and digital era of work, Viva integrates into Microsoft Teams and works rather like the intranet of old by collecting essential parts of a business into a central location. Microsoft is splitting Viva up into four specific modules: connections, insights, topics, and learning.
Viva Learning includes all training materials for a business. Image: Microsoft The last module inside Viva is Topics. “Think of Viva topics as a Wikipedia for the organization,” explains Spataro. It uses AI to organize content and automatically surfaces topic cards with documents, videos, and related people. Viva Topics will generate topic cards from apps like Office, Teams, and SharePoint.
Microsoft Viva is partly launching today. Viva Topics is available now for Microsoft 365 customers, and a public preview of Viva Insights also starts today. Microsoft is also launching a private preview of Viva Learning and plans to announce more additions to Microsoft Viva throughout 2021.
Microsoft says it’s only just getting started with Microsoft Viva and that it’s designed to be an “open and extensible platform” for partners. Viva also furthers Microsoft’s ambition to put Teams at the center of its strategy for work and to act as a hub into everything the company does.
Much like Microsoft Teams’ Together mode feature, Viva is clearly inspired by the pandemic-era drive toward remote working. While there’s still a debate around how dramatically office jobs will change once the pandemic is over, Microsoft is very much betting that the way we’re working right now is the new normal.
source 
