Microsoft refers to the grouping of Viva Connections, Viva Engage, Viva Amplify, Answers in Viva, and People in Viva as the communities and communications section of Viva. These applications, most based on legacy technologies like Yammer and Delve, collectively provide features that help employees collaborate and receive organization news, and to communicate and network with their inner circle of colleagues.
Viva Connections
Viva Connections is a Teams App that provides a central hub for organizational news, resources, and communications. Employees have a personalized dashboard where they can organize relevant feeds, tools, and other resources. Organizations can use it to push messages and updates down to employees.
Planned enhancements for 2025 are focusing primarily on user access through new cards, the main UI experience in the Connections dashboard:
- Document Library cards show all files in a directory, removing the need to drill down into a folder
- MySites cards provide quick access to sites the user follows
- End-user cards are customizable, allowing users to connect to any tool or site
- Engage cards will allow users to see and interact with their Engage feed, reducing the need to switch between Viva apps
- List-based cards help editors gather forms and surveys that collect data in one place.
Other updates will replace the current Feed experience with a SharePoint News reader experience with more functionality and include a SharePoint app bar feature for accessing Connections, News notifications for government cloud users, and e-mail notifications with analytic summaries for editors, oddly relieving them of the need to use Connections.
Viva Engage
Viva Engage (formerly Yammer) is an internally facing social platform that employees use for collaboration, conversations, communities, and social interaction. It includes typical social media features like storylines, social posting, recognition features, and two-way communication. Viva Engage uses Teams as a client.
Engage recently released a large number of features in 2024 that brought in more Yammer functionality; however, there are still many items under development that were delayed from 2024. Microsoft’s goal is to eventually have all the features available in the Teams app, as some of the features are still only available in the Web application.
Key areas receiving updates include the following:
Administration updates will provide more granular control, reduce some current manual efforts, and help with monitoring. Key examples include the following:
- Community settings are being migrated to the page settings, providing more granular control
- Admins, leaders, and communicators can be managed in the Engage admin center and through Entra ID groups
- An admin communications dashboard will help monitor activities in campaigns, communications, and audiences, providing new analytics to discover trends.
User improvements will see Engage reactions adopt the style of other Microsoft 365 products, including Teams; an emoji picker that removes the need to use keyboard shortcuts; and notifications to let users know when others reply or react to a user’s post. There will also be updates to the Teams mobile app and new options to mute other users’ posts in their feed to cut down on chatter.
Copilot in Engage will expand the data it queries, accessing discussion posts, questions, storylines, and answers that were previously left out of searches. There is no admin setting to eliminate the data sources from Copilot, so customers will need to let users know that their information is searchable.
Long-term updates are expected to support cross-tenancy campaigns and communities, a feature designed to help partners and vendors work together on projects and build relationships.
Viva Amplify
Viva Amplify is a browser-based campaign management component used for organizational communication and awareness around shared goals and events. Based on the mature SharePoint News feature, it provides tools to create, manage, and distribute messages (publications) across multiple channels, including Outlook, Teams, and SharePoint Online.
Most of the future investment is focused on campaign creators, helping them build and manage publications more effectively. For example, Amplify will support multiple author collaboration, the ability to copy an existing campaign to speed the creation of new campaigns, and an option to upload a list of e-mails to make it easier to send messages through Outlook. Other updates will allow creators to publish through Viva Engage and share SharePoint pages through Amplify to draw more attention to them. There is no immediate plan to bring Amplify into the Teams app, so customers will likely need to continue using the Web app.
Review features are expected to bring a “dwell time” graph that will show the average time users spend reading a publication, but it is limited to activities in SharePoint and Outlook.
Answers in Viva
Answers in Viva is a knowledge-sharing component (inside Viva Engage and Teams) that can help employees find and share answers to common questions by connecting the employee with subject matter exports or providing an answer through internal crowdsourced responses. The service is only as good as its adoption and only identifies users as experts if they respond to questions, which will alienate experts who choose not to participate. Some departments may find it most useful by nominating someone in their group to monitor questions and provide official responses.
The only updates planned for Answers is a feature for experts and admins to mark answers as verified and correct, giving them more credibility. However, this feature should be implemented with an all-or-nothing approach, as only verifying some answers will immediately make correct but unverified answers less credible.
People in Viva
People in Viva is a networking solution akin to LinkedIn but restricted to the employees of an organization and curated by the organization. Employees have profiles, expertise, interests, and recent activities. The service analyzes profiles and recommends new contacts to increase an employee’s network.
There are no planned updates for People in Viva, which could indicate the potential demise of the service. However, the component relies on mature underlying technology (Microsoft Graph and LinkedIn Graph), so it could be Microsoft is holding off on new features while it focuses on other parts of Viva. Customers should hold off on investing time in populating data until more is known.