Microsoft Announce Microsoft Viva, An AI-Derived Info-hub for Enterprises

Microsoft announced the launch of Microsoft Viva, an employee experience platform that aims to deliver first - and third-party products across learning, knowledge, insights, wellness, and engagement. As a part of this, Microsoft introduced Viva Topics, Viva Connections, Viva Insights, and Viva Learning, modules stemming from Project Cortex. 

Most enterprises have to wrangle uncountable data buckets, some of which unavoidably be hardly used or forgotten. According to a Forrester survey, between 60% and 73% of all data within an organization is never analyzed or checked for understandings or larger trends. The opportunity cost of this unused data is significant. A Veritas report costing at $3.3 trillion by 2020 if the current trend holds. That’s why the business segment has taken an interest in reasoning search and robotic process automation products that ingest, understand, organize, and act on digital content from multiple digital sources.

Microsoft 365 CVP Jared Spataro said, “This fall, we saw the daily active users' number in Microsoft Teams climb to 115 million, while Microsoft 365 users around the world generated more than 30 billion collaboration minutes in a single day as people communicated, collaborated, and co-authored content … But to truly empower people to feel connected, supported, and able to bring their best selves to work we need to do more.” He further added that, “consulting partners including Accenture, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Ernst & Young will provide services to bring customers onboard with Viva. “Viva brings together communications, knowledge, learning, resources, and insights into an integrated experience that empowers people and teams to be their best, from anywhere.”

Viva Topic

In September, Project Cortex — a Microsoft 365 offering that analyses documents, conversations, meetings, and videos to spot domain experts and populate a knowledge database while surfacing info in Office apps, Outlook, and Microsoft Teams — exited preview. But rather than launch Cortex as a single platform. Microsoft said, it would make its capabilities available as “a set of unique innovations” starting with SharePoint Syntex, which taps artificial intelligence to automate the capture, ingestion, and classification of content, building on SharePoint’s existing content features.

According to Microsoft, it uses artificial intelligence to reason over an organization’s data and automatically organize content and expertise across systems and teams. Topics funnels data into related subjects like projects, products, processes, and customers. When employees see an unaware acronym or project in email or chat, for instance, there tend to hover on the word and pop out a topic card with a description and related specialists, documents, and videos.

The artificial intelligent system that powers Viva learns from signals, or behavioral data resulting from inputs. These derive from the pages that employees visit, the videos they watch, and the support tickets they raise. That’s not to remark detailed info it collects about users, including job titles, locations, departments, co-workers, and potentially all of the documents, emails, and other documents they author. Each signal informs the artificial intelligent system’s decision-making so that it self-improves endlessly. Automatically learning how various resources are applicable to each person and ranking those resources accordingly.

Within Topics, selecting “card” takes you to a knowledge page curated by Artificial Intelligence and experts with information like diagrams that map appropriate relationships between different topics. This page also linked topics recommended to SMEs, with expertise added to specific end-user profiles and extended into people cards throughout Microsoft 365. Topics play nicely with Microsoft apps including SharePoint and Microsoft Search, Microsoft says, and highlights will be integrated into the hub from Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and other Microsoft 365 apps throughout 2021.

Viva Connections

Accompanying Topics is Viva Connections, which brings conversations, news, and other resources together in devices and apps like Microsoft Teams. It’s designed to deliver a tailored feed in which employees can explore news and contribute to internal conversations.

By using Connections, corporates can publish content from Microsoft 365 apps including SharePoint, Yammer, or Microsoft Stream to a single feed. Instead, they can post external news and content they want workers to see, for specific departments, location, or job roles by using audience targeting. Management can also bring staff members' attention to feed objects based on properties like “always on top,” “until read,” and “X number of impressions.”

Within Viva Connections, employees can share feedback and contribute in conversations about news and announcements with Yammer communities. Moreover, Viva Connections provides staff with a dashboard where they can learn and complete new tasks. Managers can design cards for current Teams app or use low-code solutions like Microsoft Power Apps, custom solutions that employ SharePoint Framework and Adaptative Cards, and third-party partner services.

Microsoft says, that “Connections will be available for desktop in the first half of 2021 and for mobile in summer 2021. Additional features will roll out over the course of 2022.”

Viva Insights

Viva Insights, the third pillar of Viva, its goal is to bring together Microsoft Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics under the new Viva brand. Its overview comes after Microsoft received criticism for allegedly enabling surveillance via Productivity Score, which allowed managers to use Microsoft 365 to track employees’ activity at a distinct level.

Microsoft claims that Viva Insights is private, de-identified, and influences safeguards like data aggregation and minimum sharing thresholds. Drawing on data and signals from Teams, Outlook, and other Microsoft 365 apps as well as Zoom, Slack, Workday, and SAP SuccessFactors, Viva Insights tries to find designs in data that might affect work results.

For instance, Viva Insights’ stay connected pane gives workforces a way to prioritize time & tasks for regular one-on-one meetings and to maintain tasks across emails, chats, and shared documents. The Protected Time experience lets employees plan focus time so that they can work nonstop during the workday. And Viva Insights’ daily Briefing email — delivered in English via Cortana, with a Spanish-language option on the way — highlights opportunities to connect, meetings to prep for, and commitments to follow up on

On the managerial side, Microsoft says, “Insights gives admins visibility into work patterns that can lead to burnout and stress, such as meeting overload, too little focus time, or time worked outside employees’ chosen work hours. Insights offer opportunities to create team action plans, providing employees recommendations and practices to prioritize well-being and potentially boost productivity.”

Debuting along with Viva Insights is the Glint Microsoft Power Business Intelligence (BI) dashboard. In public screening to joint Glint-Workplace Analytics clients as part of Viva Insights, it’s planned to find where teams might be struggling, proactively regulate work norms, and count the effect of those changes over time. New Workplace Analytics integrations in the Glint platform as a part of a pilot allow employers to analyze engagement data including, comment data based on metrics such as weekly collaboration hours, workweek span, and manager-employee one-on-one time.

As of today, an Insights app for Teams is available in public preview for Microsoft 365 users with Exchange Online. Microsoft says, “that in the coming months, updates to Insights will bring additional experiences including a “virtual commute” to wrap up the workday, check-ins for pause and reflection, and integration with Headspace, and actionable insights in Teams like recommended time for learning and courses from LinkedIn Learning.”

Viva Learning

Viva Learning, the final component of Microsoft’s Viva platform, brings together corporate communications, knowledge, learning, resources, and insights. It’s a hub where staff can discover, share, assign, and learn from content libraries across LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn, third-party content providers, and custom content.

People can search for and share training from Learning in a chat as they would other types of content. Teams and groups of people can also establish their own learning tab with customized, specific learning content. Learning displays recommended content in a tailored view, and Topics offers learning ideas within the topic center, along with other information resources.

Viva Learning shows the learning assignments a manager has made when they’re due, and employees’ reported completion status. Workforces can see the learning allocated to them along with due dates and other significant info or engage with LinkedIn Learning directly through Teams via an embedded player.

On the content side of the equation, Microsoft says, “it’s collaborating with platforms including Skillsoft, Coursera, Pluralsight, EdX, Cornerstone OnDemand, Saba, and SAP SuccessFactors. Organizations that license those libraries will be able to access content within Learning later this year. It plans to make APIs available so additional customers and partners can integrate with Learning.”

Starting in February, Microsoft will preview the Learning app for Teams with a small number of customers and partners. It expects to make it generally available later this year.