Coordinate setup and deployment of Viva Insights
In this unit, we walk you through the steps to bring Microsoft Viva Insights into focus for your organization. Setup and planning take a little time, but it's not complex.
Licensing and environment requirements
The first step in coordinating setup is to assign licenses to the users whose mailboxes you want to analyze. These could include all the employees in your organization or a specific subset. Companies get the most benefit when they deploy Viva Insights to the entire company or to a large group of employees. Doing so ensures statistical significance and meaningful comparative analysis.
To configure Viva Insights, you must have a Global admin, an Exchange Online (EXO) admin, or an Insights admin role. Viva Insights also requires the applicable Viva Insights licensing and a Microsoft 365 or Office 365 tenant with Exchange Online Plan 1 or Plan 2.
Environment requirements vary depending on the type of insights you view in Microsoft Viva Insights. These include Personal insights, Manager insights, and Leader insights in Microsoft Teams as well as Advanced insights in the web-based service.
| Supported Microsoft 365 environments | Unsupported Microsoft 365 environments |
|---|---|
| - Worldwide Multi-tenant - Dedicated Multi-tenant - Government Community Cloud (GCC) |
- GCC-High - DoD - Microsoft 365 Germany - Microsoft 365 Operated by 21Vianet |
Assign Viva Insights administrator and other roles
Certain roles may need to be assigned specific Microsoft 365 admin roles to configure and manage Viva Insights. The roles are distinct in their assigned responsibilities and access permissions. Each role only gives access to actions, pages, reports, and data that correspond with that role. Roles are assigned independently, are not cumulative, and don't roll up.
| Role | Access and responsibility |
|---|---|
| Insights Administrator | Has access to Data sources, Upload pages within Data sources, and Analyst settings. Configures the privacy settings and system defaults and for preparing, uploading, and verifying the organizational data for Viva Insights. |
| Insight Business Leaders | View organizational insights within the Viva Insights app. |
| People Managers | View their teams' organization trends within the Viva Insights app. |
| Analyst | Accesses all service features except Upload and some Analyst settings that are only available to admins. Accesses the most data of all roles including the ability to launch, manage, and track Plans in the advanced insights app |
| Analyst (Limited Access) | Accesses the same data as the Analyst role but with the following restrictions: - No access to Query designer - Read-only access to Analyst settings |
| Program Manager | Accesses organizational data for Viva Insights within the advanced insights app. Opens, manages, and tracks Plans in the advanced insights app |
Note
Insights Administrators are not Microsoft 365 admins. Unless they are also assigned the role of Microsoft 365 admin, they only have access to organizational data, not to Microsoft 365 data.
Deploy Personal Insights
Configure access at the user or tenant level
You can enable Viva Insights access for all the users in your organization or select individual users. For example, you could opt out an employee completely, which would turn off all Viva Insights functionality for that user. However, the employee can choose to opt back in. To configure user or tenant-level settings in the Microsoft 365 admin center, you need to have a Global admin or an Exchange Online admin role.
Note
Everyone's data is kept private. Personal insights in Viva Insights follows a few important data privacy principals:
- As a Viva Insights user, only you can see your own data.
- Your data is stored and computed in your Exchange Online mailbox.
- You can opt in and opt out at any time.
- Personal insights in Viva Insights shows you no personally identifiable info of coworkers beyond what you can already see in Outlook and Teams.
Deploy team and organization insights
Change has become an inherent part of organizational life, and the resulting trends can create either tensions or opportunities. Viva Insights interprets your teams and organization's trends so that you know exactly where training and support are needed.
Organization trends are designed specifically to empower qualifying managers and business leaders with privacy-protected organizational insights based on usage of Microsoft 365.
The manager and leader insights use collaboration data from Microsoft 365 and, depending on your setup, either organizational data uploaded by your admin in Advanced Insights or the data present in Microsoft Entra ID. All of this data is scrubbed to maintain personal privacy. Viva Insights applies intelligence to this information to make it easier for managers and leaders to see work patterns and take action to improve the productivity and wellbeing of their teams and organizations.
Manage teams in Viva Insights
Licensed Viva Insights users can create a team and view insights about it within Insights. They can add or confirm members on the home page or make changes to the team on the Teamwork habits page. When a user isn't a manager, Insights prompts them to create one.
For managers, Insights suggests a list of team members derived from Microsoft Entra ID that they can either confirm or edit. To view manager insights for employees who report to them, you need to meet or exceed the minimum number of direct and indirect reports based on organizational data. The Insights admin sets this number.
In addition to the requirements already discussed, to access Organization trends and Teamwork habits, a certain number of licenses need to be assigned to people in your organization, and that number needs to be equal to or greater than your minimum group size. The default minimum group size is 10, so at least 10 people in your organization need a license before you can access these pages for the first time.
Deploy Advanced Insights
Viva Insights includes the Advanced insights app, which has advanced analysis tools for deep diving into data that's shown both within Microsoft Teams and in the app. The advanced analysis tools include different ways to analyze data and create custom reports for your company's business leaders.
Organizational data
In the Organizational data page, an admin can check the quality of data that’s already been uploaded, check the status of existing data connections, and upload new data. To learn more about the Organizational data page and how to upload data into Viva Insights, refer to Organizational data in Viva Insights.
Manager settings
On the Manager settings page, an admin can enable Group insights and control who can see them in the Viva Insights app in Teams and on the web. Group insights shows managers aggregated wellbeing and productivity insights about their direct and indirect reports based on organizational hierarchy.
Privacy settings
Viva Insights admins can use Privacy settings to determine what data your organization wants to exclude from analysis and what data can be visible for advanced insights. To learn more about how Viva Insights keeps personal data private, refer to this article on Privacy and data protection with Viva Insights.