Microsoft Viva Review: How Does it Compare to Yammer?

When Microsoft launched Teams, questions were raised about why someone would want Teams and Yammer both. Microsoft decided to end the discussion, and the company integrated Yammer into Microsoft 365 tools like Teams and now calls it Microsoft Viva.

Yammer, now known as Microsoft Viva, is a workplace social and community platform where employees can connect and interact with each other on specific topics or even different ones. This guide will give you a complete Microsoft Viva review and how it compares to Yammer.

What is Microsoft Viva?

With Microsoft Viva, employees can interact with their colleagues or get insights from top officials on various discussion topics.

The main aim of Microsoft Viva is to bring together learning, knowledge, resources, communications, and insights together to enhance the employee experience.

Employees can post pictures, text, videos, or any other content and keep other employees updated about their whereabouts. Also, various components of Microsoft Viva have their distinct role.

• Viva Connections
  • This is a Microsoft Viva component that helps you deliver or access companies’ policies, participate in company discussions, create a new topic of discussion, and much more.
  • The main aim of Viva Connections is to provide a sense of belonging to the employees.
  • This module of Microsoft Viva provides customized and valuable information, and people can work in a digital space connected with other employees.
  • You can use the search bar for relevant content, sites, news, and other information from across the organization.
• Viva Insights
  • Each employee gets access to their personal experiences and insights that will help them secure time for regular breaks, focus on work, learn and develop themselves, and more.
  • A new dashboard brings employee feedback from LinkedIn Glint with Viva Insights’ collaboration data, allowing leaders to accurately identify the root cause of team struggle and make changes to get desired output.
  • Customers can include data from other sources, such as Zoom or Slack.
• Viva Learning
  • To keep you updated, it brings the best content from LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn, and other third-party partners.
  • The topics range from broader ones to granular ones as well.
  • The topics are accessible in a variety of formats as you please.
• Viva Topics
  • Microsoft Viva Topics uses AI solutions to automatically organize content related to your team projects, products, and customers.
  • Leaders can curate and share knowledge pretty easily via web pages.
  • It makes it easy to access knowledge.

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Comparison: Microsoft Viva Engage Vs. Yammer

While Microsoft Viva Engage is built on the base of Yammer, many new features have been added, such as leadership corners, storyline announcements, ask-me-anything events, campaigns, etc., to provide a much-improved experience.

Here are the new features on Microsoft Viva Engage that differ from Yammer.

1. Leadership Corner

Here, leaders can connect with their employees and educate them about things that should be known to them. Moreover, Leaders can discuss, post on their storylines, create virtual events, and more.

Employees can get in touch with their leaders from a single place. In addition, leaders can easily broadcast news, information, or updates to the entire organization and measure the impact created by it using analytics.

2. Storyline Announcements

You can share your thoughts and ideas of information via engaging stories. You can add images, texts, videos, and other media to your stories and post them.

Further, you can also create polls and have the entire organization vote for that idea. Finally, storyline announcements can be targeted to a specific audience or community and pinned to view on top of your feed.

3. Ask-Me-Anything events

Employees can further interact with their leaders, share their ideas using the Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) events, and participate in other virtual events to strengthen their bond with the company.

You can submit your question before or during the event and get notified when your leader has responded to your question. You can even schedule the Ask-Me-Anything event and search it for future reference.

4. Campaigns

Campaigns can be created or managed by leaders or community managers. For example, you can create a campaign to drive awareness of like-minded people to a specific idea or topic.

You can add a custom headline, description, and a call to action. In addition, employees can join the campaign, interact with the leaders and promote it to enhance its impact further.

5. Advanced Analytics

Leaders or community managers can look at the analytics that can help them measure and improve the effectiveness of their engagement efforts.

The metrics that can be evaluated are insights on reach, sentiment, feedback, trends, influencers, etc. Advanced Analytics makes use of the powers of the Microsoft Graph to provide a better representation of the metrics.

You can check out our guide that helps you understand how to use and download Microsoft Viva Engage.

These are all the new things available in Microsoft Viva Engage that top the features of Yammer. The three main benefits of using Microsoft Viva Engage are facilitating remote work, strengthening team bonds, and promoting self-expression and reach.

New features for Microsoft Viva Engage are rolling out from February 13, 2023. While Yammer will be replaced in Microsoft Teams, its web and mobile apps will continue to work.