Monday Masterclass: Week 1 Viva Engage Admin and Governance
Welcome to the first week of our Monday Masterclass series! This week, we dive into the essentials of Admin and Governance for Viva Engage. Our goal is to equip you with the knowledge and tools needed to effectively manage and govern your Viva Engage environment. Here are the key topics that we'll cover. Download the presentation slides at aka.ms/Masterclass/Week1Slides Viva Engage Admin Roles and Responsibilities In this section, we will cover the roles and responsibilities of Engage admins, network administrators and community administrators. Network administrators are responsible for configuring controls, managing usage policies, creating communities, monitoring keywords, and managing users. They can also mute users for the network and set community settings such as restricting posting and limiting moves. Community administrators, on the other hand, manage community settings, edit conversations, and control posting permissions. Manage admin roles in Viva Engage | Microsoft Learn Viva Engage Communities and Microsoft 365 Groups Communities in Engage rely heavily on Microsoft 365 Groups as a backbone for managing groups and associated data. In this section, we’ll talk about how you can use the power of M365 Groups to automate the management of these communities and how M365 Groups supports file storage for Engage. Create a dynamic group in Viva Engage | Microsoft Learn Microsoft 365 group expiration policy | Microsoft Learn Where are my Viva Engage files stored? - Microsoft Support Branding and Multi-Tenant Setup This section will cover how to customize branding and set up a multi-tenant environment to support diverse organizational needs. We will explore the steps to create a cohesive and branded experience for your users across different tenants. Configure your Viva Engage network | Microsoft Learn Set up Viva Engage for a multitenant organization | Microsoft Learn Integration with Microsoft 365 Apps We will discuss the seamless integration of Viva Engage with Microsoft 365 apps such as Teams, Outlook, and SharePoint. This integration enhances collaboration and productivity by allowing users to access Engage features directly within these apps. Set up Viva Engage | Microsoft Learn Work with Viva Engage from Outlook - Microsoft Support Include a Viva Engage feed in a SharePoint page | Microsoft Learn Analytics and Reporting In this section, we will explore the various analytics and reporting capabilities within Viva Engage. Community analytics help measure growth, engagement, and trends, while advanced analytics with a Viva Suite License provide deeper insights. We will also discuss how to utilize these analytics to inform actions and improve community management. View and manage analytics in Viva Engage | Microsoft Learn Moderation We will cover the robust moderation capabilities across Engage, including keyword monitoring, user muting and view-only mode, and community settings management. Monitor Keywords | Microsoft Learn Reduce visibility of a user's posts in Viva Engage | Microsoft Learn Manage user privileges with view-only mode in Viva Engage | Microsoft Learn Mute a community for your organization in Viva Engage - Microsoft Support Report a Viva Engage conversation | Microsoft Learn Leadership and Audience Management This section will focus on identifying and managing leaders within Viva Engage. We will discuss how to set up leader audiences, enable leaders to share updates, and host events. The new Answers Admin role will also be covered, highlighting its importance in managing knowledge bases and featuring topics. Identify leaders and manage audiences in Viva Engage | Microsoft Learn Conclusion Week one of our series will create the foundation and serves as a comprehensive overview of the admin and governance capabilities within Viva Engage. By understanding these key areas, you can ensure your organization is well-equipped to manage and govern Engage successfully. Be sure to visit aka.ms/vivaengage/masterclass to see the full listing of upcoming sessions. Let us know in the comments if there are any topics you are hoping to see covered in this session. We will do our best to accommodate.
Introducing Community Experts in Viva Engage
We’re thrilled to announce the addition of a new role within a Viva Engage community, community experts. A community expert is a member of a community who is assigned by a community admin to serve as a subject matter expert within a specific community. Adding a community expert role to your community ensures additional support and engagement throughout the community. A community expert can mark the best answer, pin posts, and ensure valuable insights and accurate information flow within the community. However, a community expert does not have the ability to manage members, assign roles etc. like a community admin. Once designated as a ‘community expert’, that label will only show within that community. Note: This feature is available as part of your existing Microsoft 365 licensing. Community expertise is determined by community admins within your organizations, not Microsoft. Microsoft does not have the ability to define a community expert in your organization. Who can be a community expert? The role of community experts is to support peers, share valuable insights, and ensure knowledge flows across departments, making information accessible and reliable for everyone. Community experts aren’t limited to high-level executives—in fact, you should seek individuals who are deeply knowledgeable, actively engaged, and approachable. Below is a guide to identify potential community experts, with examples and scenarios to illustrate ideal candidates. Community expert capabilities today: Marking “Best answer”: With the new role, community experts can now mark an answer as the best answer on a question post. Pinning/Unpinning a post: Community experts can now pin posts that they want to highlight in a community. 1. Defining an effective Community Expert: Subject Matter Expertise: Has specialized knowledge in a field or topic that benefits others across the organization. They can answer technical questions or provide insights into niche areas. Active & Engaged: Participates regularly in community discussions, contributing thoughtful responses and guiding discussions constructively. Approachable & Helpful: Willing to share their knowledge openly, whether through direct answers or by directing people to the right resources. Trusted by Peers: Known within their team or department as a reliable source of accurate information, with a reputation for being insightful and dependable. 2. Examples of community expert personas by department Technical (Engineer): Someone who may not be the head of a department but has extensive experience in specific technical stacks (e.g., cloud infrastructure, coding languages, hardware troubleshooting). Scenario: A mid-level software engineer, often answers questions related to backend development and cloud computing in a 'teams' chat or via email or even in an Engage community, providing clear explanations and solutions. Their insights are practical and resonate with peers. Legal: A non-executive legal team member who has detailed knowledge of compliance, intellectual property, or contract law. Scenario: An associate in the legal team within a company has guided several product teams on compliance questions. While they are not in management or a senior level leader, their guidance on data protection protocols has become invaluable across departments. And they are likely to have the most accurate information or help verify what is accurate. Communications Management: A mid-level comms lead who excels in crafting messaging strategies, managing internal and external communications, and navigating crisis communications. Scenario: A communications manager frequently advises teams on tailoring messaging for key audiences. When the company has faced an issue, they have been involved and instrumental in responding to the crisis and can be trusted to speak on behalf of the organization/team. Supply Chain Operations: A logistics coordinator or mid-level operations manager with deep insight into vendor relations, inventory management, or distribution channels. Scenario: A logistics coordinator known for their in-depth understanding of vendor logistics and delivery timelines. They regularly share tips on optimizing supply chain processes, helping various departments troubleshoot and improve. Facilities Management: Someone with an understanding of facilities operations, maintenance scheduling, or building management systems. Scenario: A facilities specialist within a specific office location, consistently advises teams on equipment maintenance schedules and energy efficiency projects. Their practical experience makes him the go-to person for questions on facilities management within that office. Note: Self-nomination and peer nomination for community experts are currently in progress and coming soon. Managing community experts Assignment Assigning a community expert: Community admins in a community may assign community experts based on their knowledge and the abilities of members in that community. In the member panel in the right rail, community admins will see a new section called: “Community Experts.” In this section, there is a link to, “Assign.” Once an admin clicks on assign, it opens a modal where the admin may add experts by clicking the “Mark as expert” button. Removal Removing an expert: After assigning a community expert, an admin can remove the expert by doing the following: Navigate to the member panel in the right rail. Click on the “+” sign in the Community Experts section. Withdrawal Withdrawing from the community expert role: After being made a community expert, a user may withdraw from this role at any time by taking the following steps: In the member panel in the right rail, click on the number of experts in the community expert section. This shows all the experts in that community with the user at the top and an option to, “Withdraw.” This then opens a modal that informs the user of the action they are taking. And the user may withdraw. Community experts play a crucial role in fostering a knowledgeable and collaborative environment, enhancing community effectiveness within Viva Engage. Stay tuned for additional capabilities that will further empower community experts.🤘Join us for the annual Viva Engage Festival, hosted by Swoop Analytics! 🤘
We are thrilled to invite you to the annual Viva Engage Festival, a celebration of our incredible journey together hosted by Swoop! This year's event promises to be bigger and better, featuring inspiring customer stories from the start of adoption to successful launches, engaging leadership sessions, and an exclusive product leadership Q&A. ✨ Why You Can't Miss This Event✨ Customer Stories: Hear firsthand experiences from other customers about their journey with Viva Engage, from initial adoption to successful implementation. Leadership Engagement: Connect with our product leaders and gain insights into the future of Viva Engage. Product Leadership Q&A: Get your questions answered by our product leaders in Ask me Anything interactive sessions. Check out the full agenda here. Networking Opportunities: Meet and network with other customers and industry experts. Recorded Sessions: All sessions will be recorded and shared afterwards, so you won't miss a thing! Here's a look back at the past sessions! 📅 Date: Wednesday, December 4, 2024 🔗 Register Here🔗 APAC EMEA AMER Don't miss out on joining this FREE event hosted by Swoop Analytics that celebrates our customer community, and the amazing progress we've made together. We look forward to seeing you there! The Swoop Benchmarking study is now available. Download it here! The report is also loaded with real-life case study examples so you can learn from the best!What’s new in Viva for Communicators at Microsoft Ignite
As organizations prepare for AI business transformation, communicating effectively across the workforce, fostering community and driving leadership engagement has become increasingly significant. Today we’re excited to introduce innovations that empower communicators, business leaders and employees with tools to connect, while improving end-user experiences and integrations across Microsoft 365, Teams and Copilot. Watch our On-Demand Ignite session for full details of what’s new for communications and communities, but here is an overview of key announcements: Publishing improvements Earlier this year, we announced that Copilot in Viva Amplify as an AI-powered assistant for to create drafts, rewrite, summarize and adjust your publications. This Copilot tool is now generally available. And to help you manage and streamline all of your campaigns, you can now require approval from team members to ensure you have the right sign off before sending. Additionally, we’re adding Viva Engage as a publishing channel which will enable you to publish to Viva Engage communities and storylines and reach frontline audiences. Communicating in the employee app Viva Connections combines news, tools, resources, and actionable dashboard cards into a single, customizable employee app. This year, we’ve added a new Spotlight section to aggregate key news and added communications-specific features like pinning and editing images to highlight campaigns and announcements. We are also deeply integrating Viva Engage announcements and adding leadership corner and feed dashboard cards to drive engagement directly within the app. Bringing it into a single place Continuing the theme of integration, we announced that Storyline will be natively integrated into Microsoft Teams, so you can share updates and narratives from leaders seamlessly to everyone in the organization. New community experiences powered by Viva Engage will be built natively into Teams in the coming months. Copilot Innovation for communications and communities Microsoft Copilot is your companion to inform, entertain, and inspire and we are adding some new capabilities that help put Copilot to work for you. Coming soon, Adaptive Cards Extensions (ACE) will surface with Microsoft 365 Copilot chat, meaning that your Viva Connections dashboards will soon be able to appear as interactive cards in Copilot. Q&A from public Engage communities will be available in Microsoft 365 workplace search. This brings a vast source of Engage knowledge into Microsoft 365 Copilot to help ground common knowledge, giving your Copilot uses increased accuracy and consistency as it draws from the collective knowledge of employees. Admins will also be able to verify knowledge and denote experts to ensure information is coming from a trustworthy source. Within Engage, Copilot's skills are expanding to help find information, summarize community content, and catch up on important conversations. Enhanced Analytics Gain deeper insights into your campaigns with new ways to track and measure analytics. In Viva Amplify, campaign owners can now set campaign goals to track progress and access click-through rates and dwell time to better understand how audiences are engaging with campaigns. In Viva Engage, AI can now help you keep up with prevailing themes and conversations through sentiment analysis, theme extraction, and content summarization. Admins can view detailed employee retention metrics in the Network Analytics dashboard. This new stat shows the difference in the 28-day retention rates between employees who use Viva Engage and employees who don't. Advanced moderation Sometimes community conversations can elevate unwanted distractions, especially during times of controversy. To give admins more control over what content is shared in your network, we are introducing new AI powered moderation tools as part of our digital safety efforts to search, manage and mute themes and keywords proactively. These content alerts mitigate controversial topics and block them from Engage Feeds & Digests. We are enhancing our keyword detection capabilities and will be bringing real-time analysis to ensure content adheres to company policies. Want to learn more about these updates? Watch the AI for Communications session and Ignite and to check out our dedicated blogs for each feature: Viva Amplify Ignite Blog Viva Connections Ignite Blog Viva Engage Ignite Blog Please Note: Many of these advanced communications and AI features are only available to customers that have a Viva Suite or an Employee Communications and Communities license. In some cases, a Microsoft 365 Copilot license is required. As always, keep an eye on our roadmap for ongoing updates and exact timing for features. Stay tuned for more updates and insights from the Viva team. - Michael Holste Senior Product Marketing Manager, Microsoft Viva
Viva Engage - Articles - what license is needed for end users
Hello, I am looking for the answer for my case. We have couple of Viva suite licenses and use Viva Engage for internal communication specifically type of message "Article" which is available only for people who are licensed. Do have to be covered also end users who are just consumers of messages (Articles) in Viva Engage and are not able to create this kind of message? Thank you Mirek
