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STEPHEN ROSE: Hey, everyone. Welcome
to another episode of "Inside Microsoft Teams."
I'm your host, Stephen Rose,
and thanks for joining us today.
One of the questions I get asked most
at conferences is, you know, what is Microsoft Viva?
And I'll start to say, "Well, it's Micro... you know
it's Microsoft Viva sales..." and it's in like, no, no, no.
"Just what is Microsoft Viva?
Can you give us a solid answer?"
And I thought, you know,
I know the perfect person to do that.
So we're going to dig into,
over the next few weeks, the different modules,
but I thought there's no one better
than Mr. Scott Smith to walk through what is Viva
and kind of understand it from the top level.
Scott, how are you?
SCOTT SMITH: I'm doing well.
How about yourself, Stephen?
STEPHEN ROSE: I'm doing good.
So what is Viva?
We announced it at Ignite last year.
We had already had some of the different modules,
things like that.
So, at the highest level, what is Microsoft Viva?
SCOTT SMITH: Yeah. So, Microsoft Viva is a digital employee
experience platform that's really built
on Microsoft technology, Microsoft 365,
and lends itself really well to the Microsoft ecosystem.
It integrates with the Graph as well
as the other parts of your Microsoft investments.
So, it makes it really easy to plug employee experience
into the day-to-day tools like Microsoft Teams
that your employees might already be using.
So, it's a plethora of different applications,
all designed to really help employees
be productive, focus on well-being,
connect with each other, engage with each other
in this modern work world of hybrid work.
STEPHEN ROSE: All right.
We'll talk about the individual apps in a second,
but this could be things like, hey
remind me that I have important training to do.
It can be things like blocking out some focus time
because I have a ton of meetings, but there's no time
for me to go back and do the action items
or suggest people I may want to reconnect with
and I haven't talked to in a while.
It's those sort of things.
It, it's sort of looking at how I'm working and saying,
here's some things that can help you or that are important
to you or that you need to be aware of.
Is that, is that a fair assessment kind of at a high level?
SCOTT SMITH: Yeah, exactly.
In addition, we have other pieces of the portfolio,
like Viva Connections, that allow for a modern intranet
solution built right into your Microsoft Teams experience.
Viva Goals, which really helps with the OKRs
and goal setting across the organization as well
as some new applications that are coming out
across 2023, as well.
So, it really has grown into a full, end-to-end employee
experience suite designed to really hit every point
of the employee's journey, from joining an organization
through maturing within an organization, to really
help them make sure that they are productive and
that we're focusing on well-being no matter where they are.
STEPHEN ROSE: We'll use some slides to break this down.
So let's take a look at those slides and talk
about the individual modules, of which I think there are 126
at this point or something like that.
How many are there now?
SCOTT SMITH: Not quite. But, yep.
STEPHEN ROSE: Six. Is it six that we're at now?
SCOTT SMITH: There's six right now,
and we're releasing a couple more through the calendar year
2023, as well.
STEPHEN ROSE: All right. Let's take a look at the slides.
SCOTT SMITH: Stephen, as you alluded to,
Microsoft Viva was actually
announced almost 2 years ago to the day, in 2021.
It initially started with four applications
within the platform: Viva Connections, Viva Insights,
Viva Topics, and Viva Learning.
Each for specific needs
of the employee experience at that time.
But as we've really grown over, say, 2022,
we've added more capabilities to the portfolio, including
OKR setting through Viva Goals
as well as community building through Viva Engage.
And then, through 2023, we're also going to be releasing
a few new applications:
Viva Amplify,
which helps support corporate-wide communication
through multiple endpoints;
Viva Pulse, which allows for point-in-time surveys
and making sure that your employees are doing well
and staying productive;
Answers in Viva, which really focuses
on aggregating the right answers from experts
across your organization, as well as a bunch
of more capabilities coming to the platform, as well.
STEPHEN ROSE: And we just talked about Viva Sales this week
and the adding in of AI to Outlook as part of that.
Is that also part of these roll-outs and things
that we're doing?
SCOTT SMITH: Exactly, exactly.
So, this kind of gives a left-to-right horizontal view
of what Microsoft Viva really is trying to do.
It's focused from an employee experience standpoint really
on four key areas: connection, insight, purpose, and growth.
And then, as you alluded to, Stephen,
and we are also focused on role-based experience, as well,
for those specific types of roles that need help.
And that's where Viva Sales comes into play.
STEPHEN ROSE: Alright. Here's my next question.
This is the one that I get asked most often,
which is, Is it spying on me?
Is it tracking and telling my boss everything
I'm doing when I'm logging in,
when I'm moving my mouse and all of that sort of stuff?
And I, you know, the answer is no, but I thought I
I would love for you to,
to talk to this and explain to people
why it's not and how it's not.
SCOTT SMITH: Yeah. So, Viva is really designed to
leverage the privacy protocols that are already put
into place in Microsoft 365 as well
as what your organization fine-tunes within,
say, the Viva Insights Solution, as well.
So, it's not designed to capture exactly what you're doing
at any given moment and feed that information
to your manager to tell you, hey
Scott hasn't been, you know, checking his email today.
What it's really designed to do is look
at information in aggregate across your organization and
identify trends to help employees be more productive
and focus on well-being.
So, I think you touched earlier
on focus time being a big aspect...
STEPHEN ROSE: Right.
SCOTT SMITH: ...of Viva, and that's what that data
and aggregation will do is, it will help look at your,
say, week ahead and say, it looks like you have a bunch
of meetings and you could probably use a little bit
of time in between those meetings to, you know,
go to the bathroom, eat some lunch, catch up on emails.
Let's go ahead and block some of that time for you
so that you can really focus on getting your work done
and capture a little bit of that employee well-being
as part of your day-to-day life, as well.
So it's not spyware, it's not designed to track you.
It's really just designed to make sure
that at least from a Viva Insight standpoint
that it's really helping you, prodding you
along to be really focused
on the well-being aspects of work, as well.
STEPHEN ROSE: Okay. Tell me if I'm right or wrong on this
because this is my impression when I've given some examples
to saying, umm it will take a look at my boss's team
as an aggregate, not at me, and it will tell my boss,
Hey, you know what? You're sending out a lot
of emails after hours that's forcing people
to work late at night,
or 70% of the meetings that your team is in
they're multitasking, they're in Teams, they're in email
or other things at once to really help to kind
of take a look at that, to look at
whether it's by group--sales/marketing--or by a manager.
But there's no way for the CIO or for HR or someone
like that to take a look at an individual person, even
though I get individual reports.
Is that correct?
SCOTT SMITH: Yeah. So, what we really do is, we try
and focus on the aggregation at the epic group level.
Exactly what you, what you're referring to, Stephen:
We don't want to be saying "Scott individually
is not checking his emails at this specific time."
But I think you gave a great example, Stephen.
One of the great capabilities of Viva Insights,
for example,
is it can let you know when you're
crafting an email to someone who is not working
in the same time zone and let you know, like,
"Hey, you're sending an email outside of their time zone.
It's probably worthwhile to either delay send this,"
which it can automatically do through Viva Insights
or maybe just send that during your your bus...
STEPHEN ROSE: Yeah
SCOTT SMITH: ...both of your business hours.
STEPHEN ROSE: I had that pop up in Teams the other day.
It told me that I was not sending a Teams message
within the working hours for this person
and did I still want to send it?
Which I thought was great because it's a member
of my team who's in Paris this week,
and it even took that into account, which was cool.
Now, Viva seems like disparate apps
that don't connect, and managing apps can be difficult
because there is no sort of single point of management.
I know that we've combined our management solution,
that we've consolidated it.
And I think that would be a really great thing
for this audience to talk about
what we've done to make it eas...more...easier to manage
and secure Viva apps within the admin center.
Could I know, I think you have a demo to show us.
So, could we switch over to that and take a look at that?
SCOTT SMITH: Yeah, exactly.
So, you touched right on it here that we really
wanted to focus today on the admin experience.
We've really heard and tried to take in feedback
from our IT administrators that have leveraged
Viva today to make it as easy as possible to set up, deploy,
and configure all of these underlying applications right
within the Microsoft admin center, like you would
any of your other Microsoft investments, as well.
So yeah, let's hop right into the demo, Stephen.
Yeah, so excellent.
So what you're seeing here is the Microsoft admin center.
So what you can do as an IT administrator now is just search
for say the keyword "Viva," and right up
at the top you'll see the nice icon
for the Microsoft Viva suite.
And once you drill into there,
it's pretty straightforward to see all
of the applications your organization has a license to.
So, right away you'll see based off
of the plan type you've had what applications
of the Viva suite your organization is licensed for.
So it makes it really easy, again, to see that
left-to-right horizontal view
of all the Viva investment your organization might have.
And what's great here is you can also just go ahead
and manage licenses and roles just like you would all
of your other Microsoft investments right here, as well.
So, if you click into "Manage licenses,"
it'll take you right to the licensing page
for the rest of your Viva products
as well as the Microsoft portfolio writ large.
Same thing with the roles, as well, for Viva-specific roles.
So again, we're really trying to make sure it's easy
for IT administrators to just go to one place
for Microsoft Viva,
set up the roles, set up the licensing,
and really make it easy with a one-stop-shop solution.
And once you've kind of managed those macro-level licensing
and roles, you can really see each individual app,
what state they're in, have you done any sort
of granular administrative features for each one
of those applications, and drill right into those.
So a good example,
let's dive right into say Viva Learning, for example.
So Viva Learning is a robust solution
within the Microsoft Viva suite that requires a
couple specific pieces of configuration.
In the past, prior to this consolidation view
in the Microsoft admin center,
you're going to be pushed out
to, say, a Viva Learning-specific page or documentation.
Now that's all housed right here
within the Microsoft admin center.
So you can see, you know all of the different pieces
of underlying information that you might need to set up.
Administrators, learning sources,
and if you ever need help--say, more information--
you can just click right there.
It'll give you a nice little fly-out of
here is the documentation on the far right,
different sort of content sources you can go ahead
and create,
again, making it seamless in one spot.
And then, so if we, say, go back
and we want to set up specific pieces of information
for Viva Learning, for example, it's really easy.
One thing that Viva Learning does, it takes learning content
from your other LMS systems that you might have
at your organization and aggregates it into one spot.
Well, if you can imagine from an IT administration
standpoint, that can be kind of complex
if you have multiple different LMS systems that
your organization might have.
With Viva learning in the MAC,
you can go ahead and configure all of that right here.
So you can choose, say, your content providers
as well as all of the necessary credentials to get
those two systems communicating with each other
without ever leaving the MAC experience, as well.
So, it makes it, again, really seamless
for, say, some of these products
within the Viva suite, like Learning, that require
maybe feeds from other systems, as well.
And then, what's really cool
within the new MAC experience, too, is,
you can also do administration functions specifically
for, say, a learning knowledge administrator right here.
You can, just like other parts of Microsoft,
choose the the right administrator from the drop-down here
and apply that permission right here,
right within the Microsoft admin center.
Very easy for those folks,
then, to manage the granular administration
of Viva Learning-specific aspects that
maybe a global IT admin doesn't need to manage.
That can be federated right down to them, as well.
So, making it really easy
for individuals to also grant access and control
to the individuals that are going to be managing
the individual parts of the applications, as well.
And that's really it, Stephen,
and we really wanted to just really focus
on the fact that all of these applications are coming
into one place right here with the Microsoft admin center,
allowing our global IT admins to configure, deploy,
and manage all their Viva investments in one spot
as well as grant that federated control
to the right individuals across the organization,
again, without leaving the experience they're
used to from Microsoft.
STEPHEN ROSE: All right. Great stuff!
It's awesome to see how well we've done now
in bringing that whole admin center together
because it was a bit of a mess early,
but it's great to see how streamlined and easy it is.
So where's the best place, first of all,
besides coming back for more episodes as we'll dive
into these individual modules in general to go learn more
about Viva and to find training for their end users?
SCOTT SMITH: Yeah. So, the number one place is
learn.microsoft.com.
There's a whole page there about setting up, deploying, as
well as what's really important, especially when
you're thinking about a suite like Viva, is that it's not
just the technology that solves some of these problems,
as well.
It's the process and the business decision-makers
that need to be part of this, as well.
So there's step-by-step information about not only
how to deploy from an IT admin standpoint but also work
with your business stakeholders to prioritize the right
rollout of the different applications and make sure
that you're really getting the business value out of it.
Part and parcel with your investment within Viva.
STEPHEN ROSE: The driving awareness to increase adoption.
Absolutely.
SCOTT SMITH: Exactly.
STEPHEN ROSE: Now, I know you're going to do
a blog that'll dig
into more of the resources and things that are out there
because I know a lot of folks are going to do that.
And we would love to have folks, you know, again
reach out to us, let us know what questions you have
as we continue to go through these different modules
and talk about new ones as they come out.
Scott, final thought before we say goodbye to everybody?
SCOTT SMITH: It's exciting times here at Microsoft Viva.
We continue to expand the portfolio.
Feel free to work with your business decision-makers
on the right tools that are right for them
and come check out Viva, the Viva suite, and see how it can,
those tools can help your organization,
help your employees be more productive in the hybrid world
of work as well as focus on their well-being.
STEPHEN ROSE: Hopefully this helps you
to get your arms around Viva,
why it's important and what it can do for end users.
And I will tell you as a company,
it has dramatically changed how our management looks
at employees, how, what their expectations are of us
and allowing us to have a much better work-life balance
because of this.
So, I can't speak any more highly about this tool.
So, Scott, thanks for joining us.
For everybody else, thanks for joining us
on this episode of "Inside Microsoft Teams."
We will see all of you very soon.
Thanks so much.
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