Microsoft launches Viva Engage social network for the workplace

Microsoft has announced that Viva Engage, announced last month at Microsoft Inspire, is generally available as of yesterday. This is a type of social network built into Microsoft Teams, and it is essentially a successor to the Yammer Communities app in Teams. It is essentially meant as a way to interact with your colleagues in a more informal way and share experiences and knowledge.

Viva Engage comes with the features you already know from Yammer communities, especially communities. You can join existing communities within your organization, where you will find posts related to more specific areas of the business. You might have a community for the whole company, but also a community for the sales team, or one for leadership, and so on. However, Viva Engage also brings more of a personal focus with its Storyline and Stories features. These are coming later, so right now it looks like Viva Engage is mostly a rebranding of Yammer Communities.

Storyline is a standard timeline, similar to what you might find on Facebook or Twitter. People can view your storyline to see your personal achievements or posts you want to make on the network. The Storylines feed lets you view relevant storyline messages from people across the organization and from people you want to follow. It will be available in public preview in September.

Meanwhile, Stories are also quite familiar if you know about Facebook Stories or any other variant of the feature. You can post short, expired videos or images to promote an ongoing event or celebrate an achievement without leaving them permanently visible on the site. This will be launched in public preview in the coming months, so it may be a while before you can actually see it.

Microsoft Viva is an employee experience platform, as Microsoft calls it, and Viva Engage is just the latest addition. There are other tools, such as Viva Goals, Viva Insights and more, all designed to help employees achieve their goals. We will likely see more tools added in the future as well.

Source: xda-developers, microsoft