The desktop experience for Viva Connections rolls out this month

The first module of Microsoft Viva, Viva Connections, is coming to desktops this month.

What you need to know

• The desktop experience for Microsoft's Viva Connections will be generally available this month.
• Viva Connections lets people see curated content from their company, including news and conversations.
• A mobile app for Viva Connections should arrive later this year.

Today, and Ignite 2021, Microsoft announced that the desktop experience for Viva Connections will be generally available this month. The company announced Microsoft Viva last month and is now rolling out its first module in the form of Viva Connections.

Microsoft Viva is an employee experience platform that aims to improve the employee experience. Viva Connections is one of the four key areas covered by Viva. It allows employees to access internal communications and company resources. Through Viva Connections, people will see personalized information that helps keep them up to date with news, conversations, and resources from their company.

In its announcement post of Microsoft Viva, the company summarizes the four key areas that it covers:

• Viva Connections provides a personalized gateway to your digital workplace where employees can access internal communications and company resources like policies and benefits and participate in communities like employee resource groups, all from a single customizable app in Microsoft Teams. The Connections app for Teams will be available on desktop in public preview the first half of 2021 with a mobile app coming later this year.
• Viva Insights gives individuals, managers and leaders personalized and actionable insights that help everyone in an organization thrive. Personal experiences and insights, visible only to the employee, help individuals protect time for regular breaks, focused work and learning, as well as strengthen relationships with their colleagues. Managers and leaders can see trends at team and organization level, as well as recommendations to better balance productivity and wellbeing. The insights are aggregated and deidentified by default to maintain personal privacy. In addition, a new dashboard allows organizations to combine employee feedback from LinkedIn's Glint with collaboration data from Viva Insights, enabling leaders to more accurately identify where teams may be struggling, proactively adjust work norms, and then measure the impact of those changes over time. Customers will also be able to incorporate data from third-party services like Zoom, Workday and SAP SuccessFactors. The Viva Insights app in Teams and the new Glint and Viva Insights dashboard are now available in public preview.
• Viva Learning makes training and professional development opportunities more discoverable and accessible in the flow of work. It aggregates all the learning resources available to an organization in one place, including content from LinkedIn Learning; Microsoft Learn; third-party providers including Skillsoft, Coursera, Pluralsight and edX; as well as an organization's own content library. From traditional learning courses to microlearning content, users can discover, share, assign and track a wide variety of learning as a natural part of the workday. The Viva Learning app is now available in private preview, and starting later this year Viva Learning will offer integrations with leading learning management systems, including Cornerstone OnDemand, Saba and SAP SuccessFactors.
• Viva Topics delivers a knowledge discovery experience that helps people connect to information and experts across the company. Using AI to reason over a customer's Microsoft 365 data, and with the ability to integrate knowledge from a variety of third-party services such as ServiceNow and Salesforce, Viva Topics automatically surfaces topic cards within conversations and documents across Microsoft 365 and Teams. Clicking on a card opens a topic page with related documents, conversations, videos and people. Viva Topics is now generally available as an add-on to Microsoft 365 commercial plans.

The desktop experience for Viva Connections is rolling out this month, but people will have to wait a bit longer for a mobile version. Microsoft states that the mobile experience will be available in the summer of this year.

Microsoft also announced a few other dates for aspects of Viva that will roll out soon. The virtual commute experience will roll out to the Viva Insights app next month. The new Home tab will also be available next month.

Microsoft announced that Viva Learning will start rolling out in public preview in April. The company also expects Viva Learning to reach general availability later this year.

Check out the other announcements coming from Microsoft Ignite!