Published November 2023
We’re seeing an increased interest from organisations on ways to keep employees socially connected and our solution is Viva Engage. In this blog we share how to bring everything into one ecosystem by migrating from Workplace by Meta to Viva Engage.
The importance of social
Over the years we’ve helped many organisations realise the benefit of connection, community and two-way communication through an enterprise social network (ESN). In the past, internal communications teams would often have to be careful how they positioned enterprise social networks to leaders and sponsors as some held the view we were unleashing third party social tools in the organisation, and distracting people from work.
However, in 2020 Microsoft announced its investment in the development and improvement of Yammer and haven’t looked back. Years later, and post-pandemic, it is evident enterprise social tools are not going away. What used to be known as Yammer, has now evolved into Viva Engage. Viva Engage builds upon the existing community platform, but now enables it to integrate into Microsoft Teams and brings a new interface and a range of new features which seamlessly bring social further into our digital workplace.
Why move to Viva Engage?
Well, if your organisation already has Microsoft 365 enterprise plans, Viva Engage is included – so why wouldn’t you use it? By turning on Viva Engage, you can further maximise your existing investment in Microsoft licenses and stay within the one ecosystem.
Integration into the digital workplace
As part of the Microsoft Viva suite, you can easily integrate Viva Engage into your communication and collaboration platforms by:
- Embedding conversations into SharePoint pages, bringing in ‘live’ content to support your more formal, published content. A great example of doing this is surfacing Viva Engage feeds on your intranet
- Adding Viva Engage into your Viva Connections dashboard to bring your company information, conversations and tools in one place
- Pinning Viva Engage within Microsoft Teams, this will help keep everything within one platform for your employees to easily navigate between your ESN, collaboration tools and other apps
- Keeping employees connected on the go, by enabling access via the Viva Engage or Microsoft Teams mobile applications
Viva Engage is constantly improving
Apart from all the things you’d expect from a modern social platform hosted in the cloud, Microsoft are continuously upgrading and enhancing Viva Engage. Some of the most recently released features include:
- ‘Leadership Corner’ (available in Premium) – a dedicated space supported by functionality which helps leaders lead ‘at scale’ online and connect with relevant audiences, all while gaining important analytics on their engagement and sentiment levels
- A dedicated ‘Answers’ tab (available as part of Viva Suite or Viva Topics products) – helping employees ask questions and get crowdsourced answers
- Employees being able to create moderated Q&A events – sometimes known as ‘Ask Me Anything’ (AMA)
- Starting a conversation or join others through your personal ‘Storyline’ feed
- Giving more control to content creators and allowing them to close their own posts and conversations
- Advanced analytics are now available giving a deeper understanding of engagement and trends with views for My Analytics, Org Analytics, My Answers and Global Answers
- Supporting the spirit of social by allowing employees to @mention people using their first name, making it feel far more conversational and less formal
And on the roadmap:
Microsoft Copilot will help us formulate campaign or topic posts by offering a summary of sentiment of that topic, providing a first draft post for us to edit, while also suggesting images to add and questions that should be answered.
How to migrate or move from Workplace to Viva Engage
If you’re looking to consolidate your technical footprint, there’s never been a better time to migrate to Viva Engage. We have a tried and tested migration process to support you to move your content from Workplace to Viva Engage. Whether you want to move all your content from groups, posts, comments, files, images or just a select number of groups for a chosen time. Our team can help you to identify what to migrate, before commencing the migration for you.
Paired with our expertise in ESN adoption, we now offer a comprehensive migration and adoption service that ensures increased momentum and success of your Viva Engage platform. This offering follows our three phase process of discovery, migration and change activities, meaning you’ll have no downtime and can enjoy all the benefits of staying within the M365 ecosystem.
Workplace to Viva Engage migrationAbout the author
Kristy Long is a Digital Workplace Consultant at Engage Squared. She has over 15 years experience delivering intranets and digital workplace solutions both as a consultant and as an in-house intranet manager. Kristy has worked across a large number of industries including government, health, education, energy and financial services and spent most of her in-house career working alongside internal communication teams. Kristy really enjoys getting to know the pain points of clients, and helping them to understand how to address these and improve the employee experience.
To balance a busy home life, she also really enjoys the peace and quiet swimming, running and reading can bring.
