Learn more about Microsoft Viva apps

Article
11/01/2023

Microsoft Viva is designed to solve modern workplace problems for hybrid workers, information workers, and frontline workers alike. Discover how Viva apps can support popular business scenarios. Then, learn more about technical details and planning considerations. Next, find specific guidance on how to get started planning, building, and launching each Viva app.

Learn more about new Viva experiences.

Discover popular business scenarios supported by Viva

Not sure which Viva app will have the most impact on your organization? Review popular needs and wants of large organizations. Then, identify which Viva app can help you reach the goals of both end users and the organization.

If your goal is to	And your scenario sounds like this	Consider this Viva app
Share organizational news, resources, tools and more with your employees	- We get most of our work done in Microsoft Teams and want to streamline where employees can find news and popular resources. - We need to support and engage our frontline workforce. - We want to streamline organizational communications into one place. - We want to connect employees to popular tools and third-party resources to improve operational efficiencies.	Viva Connections
Improve productivity, workforce effectiveness, and employee engagement	- We want to be more aware of work patterns and how we get work done as individuals, as teams, and as an organization. - We want to surface opportunities for how to improve our business outcomes and take steps to protect employee wellbeing. - We need to help business leaders address critical questions about organizational resiliency and work culture.	Viva Insights
Train employees smarter and more efficiently	- We need to create a training program that allows employees to discover, share, and recommend training material. - We want to make it easy for frontline workers to access training and skilling opportunities. - We need a training solution that can aggregate training content from multiple sources. - We want to engage new employees in training programs that will help them ramp-up into their new roles.	Viva Learning
Connect people across your organization, no matter where they work	- We want to increase engagement and social connections with employees working remotely, in different locations, and across work groups. - We want to increase the visibility of our Viva Engage communities and encourage more participation. - We want to boost participation in employee resource groups and social groups. - We want to create space for employees to ask questions and crowdsource answers from outside their teams.	Viva Engage
Align teams with your organization's strategic priorities, mission and purpose	- We want to establish a transparent view of our organization's priorities and goals - We want to energize teams by giving them a clear view into how their work aligns with greater business needs. - We want to empower individuals to increase their accountability for reaching broader organizational goals.	Viva Goals

Get more details about each Viva app

Each app offers special features, customization opportunities, and ways to integrate with other Microsoft 365 apps and services.

Viva Connections: Culture and communication

Feature	Description
Company Branding	Customize your employee app with your organization’s name, logo, and colors for seamless integration.
Feed	Simplify communications sharing into a single, personalized view so employees can explore news and join conversations, keeping people connected and building relationships with people from across the organization.
Boost	Ensure visibility of high priority content by boosting to the top of employees’ feeds based on various conditions such as until read, set number of impressions, or date.
Third party integration	Customize and extend Viva Connections with a rich set of 1st and 3rd party integrations from our partner ecosystem.
Dashboard	Provide useful company resources and actionable tasks in a central, personalized destination, designed to keep your employees in the flow of work.
Audience targeting	Provide the most relevant content to the right audiences by departments, regions, job roles, and more.
Built on Microsoft 365	Quickly deploy and manage Viva Connections through the Microsoft Teams admin console, no need to push additional apps to your employees’ devices.

Viva Insights: Productivity and wellbeing

Feature	Description
Personal insights	Explore ways to build better work habits. Track and improve the effectiveness of your meetings. Prioritize wellbeing with actionable recommendations, such as reserving time for focused work.
Manager insights	Help your team stay connected and engaged by better understanding team-level working habits, including patterns that lead to burnout and stress.
Leader insights	Identify trends and opportunities across the organization to drive a culture of meeting effectiveness, empowered employees, and organizational agility.
Advanced insights	Generate custom insights and use predefined Power BI templates to make data-driven decisions across common business scenarios. Extend the capabilities of Viva Insights by combining Microsoft 365 data with external data, such as customer relationship management (CRM) and survey data, which might require additional capacity units. For more information, see Viva Insights Capacity.
Business transformation templates	Quantify the impact of new programs and business shifts over time through preconfigured metric sets and visualizations.
Manager effectiveness template	See strengths and opportunity areas for managers. Discover trends in how managers collaborate with their direct reports and balance after-hours collaboration demands.
Data extensibility	Combine Microsoft 365 data with data from sources—including CRM, surveys, or other collaboration platforms—for richer insights.
Dynamic recommendations	Turn insights into action through research-backed tips and suggested actions, including reminders to block weekly focus time and for managers to schedule one-on-one time with employees.
Collaboration pattern templates	Visualize how your employee network size, burnout risk, meeting habits, and other collaboration-based insights vary by function, level, and geography. See how the organization splits time between internal and customer-facing meetings.
Query designer	Run fully customized analyses tailored to your business objectives. Export query results for use in other reporting and visualization tools.
Advanced analysis accelerators	Use features including an R-script library to help analyze organizational data trends, processes, and networks.

Viva Learning: Skilling and growth

Feature	Description
Learning tabs	Create learning tabs in the Teams channels you collaborate into curate learning selections for your team.
Social learning	Share learning content in Teams chat and conversations and email.
Recommend and track	Recommend learning content to colleagues and track reported completion progress.
Diverse content libraries	Bring together learning content from Microsoft, third party providers, learning management systems, and your own organization in one hub.
Personalized recommendations	Use intelligent search and discovery to surface relevant and trending content.
Custom learning content	Bring company resources into a standard learning interface through SharePoint integration.
Protect learning time	Add learning courses to your calendar and get weekly suggestions to book learning time.

Viva Engage: Building meaningful relationships

Feature	Description
Communities	Connect with coworkers in communities built around interests, job types, departments, and everything else to help employees find belonging.
Announcements	Keep everyone informed and engaged across web and mobile with a variety of announcement types that notify people and reach them where they are.
Conversations	Have discussions, @mention coworkers, pin conversations, and build dialogue across teams and departments.
Analytics	Get detailed insights into every community, event, and conversation to measure activity and engagement.
Virtual events	Bring leaders and employees together for town halls and virtual events.
Post questions and highlight best answers	Upvote replies and mark best answers to crowdsource solutions and help everyone learn.
Stories	Create, upload, and share stories and follow stories from leaders and coworkers.

Viva Goals: Align to achieve results

Feature	Description
Projects	Keep track of the work your organization is executing to achieve your OKRs (objectives and key results).
Review Dashboard	View a customizable, presentation-ready dashboard that populates real-time data on OKR progress.
Approval workflows	Managers can regulate OKR workflows for their teams.
Tags	Add tags to group similar OKRs and projects under a common identifier.
Explorer	Generate preset OKR views and create custom views.
Bookmarks	Bookmark users and teams to quickly access their OKRs and related activities.
Quick Search and hot keys	Easily search for users, teams, objectives, and projects. Use hot key combinations to perform tasks quickly.
Share objectives via email	Provide visibility to stakeholders, share wins and updates, and request updates from OKR owners.
Nudge users	Send an email notification to a user to check in on or update an OKR.
Multiple alignment	Align a single OKR to two or more OKRs above it in the organization.
Follow organizations, teams, and users	Follow and get updates from relevant organizations, teams, and users.
Private objectives	Make sensitive objectives visible to only designated audiences.
Objective delegation	Delegate another individual to manage OKRs on your behalf.
KPI summary	View one or more key performance indicators in a single view.

Review minimum requirements and planning considerations

Each app has its own technical requirements before it can be customized and shared with others. Review the requirements and other considerations like change management and the impact on end-users to help you determine a team and timeline for planning, building, and launching.

Viva Connections

Technical requirements:
- Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 license
- SharePoint home site
- Global navigation enabled and customized
- Modern SharePoint sites
Impact on end-users:
- New options to get news, complete tasks, and connect with others
- Increased value of the Microsoft Teams desktop and mobile apps
- Improved processes and streamlined tasks
Admins and roles:
- SharePoint admin
- Microsoft Teams admin
- Your organization’s stakeholders and business partners from groups like HR, communications specialists, and technology advocates
- Site owners and authors for the home site
Change management considerations:
- Microsoft Teams adoption (if you aren’t already working in Teams)
- How to use Viva Connections on desktop and mobile apps
- How to engage with the Dashboard, the Feed, and Resources
- Where to view the latest news and announcements
- Specialized guidance for different audiences like frontline workers or hybrid workers

Viva Insights

Technical requirements:
- Microsoft 365 or Office 365 E1/A1/G1/E3/A3/G3/E5/A5/G5, Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Business Standard, Business Premium, or Exchange Online Plan 1 or Plan 2 license
- Discover and pin the app or Viva Suite subscription is required for some features
Impact on end-users:
- No need to leave Microsoft Teams or Outlook to get help with everyday tasks and improve your work patterns and wellbeing.
- See Discover and pin the app in Teams and Pin the add-in in Outlook for how to get started
Admins and roles:
- Insights Administrator
- Microsoft Teams admin
- Microsoft 365 enterprise or global admin
- Exchange admin
- Insights Business leader
- HR information system admin
- Analyst or Analyst (Limited Access)
- People manager - learn more about roles in Viva Insights
Change management considerations:
- Your Microsoft 365 enterprise or global admin assigns the other roles required for setting up and using Viva Insights in your organization. See Assign admin roles for details

Viva Learning

Technical requirements:
- Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 License
- Viva Learning Premium subscription or Viva Suite subscription is required for some features
- A Microsoft Teams team (if you're creating a learning tab in Teams)
Impact on end-users:
- No need to leave Microsoft Teams to access and share content from Microsoft, third-party providers, or learning management systems
- Centralized place to recommend and view recommended learning content
Admins and roles:
- Microsoft Teams admin
- Microsoft 365 global admin or SharePoint admin
- Knowledge admin
Change management considerations:
- Microsoft Teams adoption (if you aren’t already working in Teams)
- Integrate Viva Learning with your SharePoint
- Integrate Viva Learning with your third-party content providers or learning management systems

Viva Engage

Technical requirements:
- Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 license
- Viva Suite or Viva Engage license
- Viva Engage
Impact on end users:
- Connect and engage with leaders, colleagues, and communities
- Viva Engage creates opportunities for asking questions and sharing knowledge, attending virtual events, building social capital, and extending employee networks
Admins and roles:
- Viva Engage Verified admin
- Microsoft Teams admin
- Community leaders and stakeholders from employee resource groups
Change management considerations:
- Microsoft Teams adoption (if you aren't already using Teams)
- Viva Engage adoption if your organization is new to Viva Engage

Viva Goals

Technical requirements:
- Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 license
- Viva Suite or Viva Goals license
Impact on end users:
- Users can view team and organizational OKRs in Teams
- Managers can update OKRs for their team in Viva Goals
Admins and roles:
- Organization owners manage members, teams, setup, and billing
- Organization admins are members who manage the setup of the organization and can manage users and teams
- Team admins are members who can manage team members
- Team owners are members who own their team members' OKRs
- Managers are members who own their own OKRs and the OKRs of employees who report to them
- Members can set up and manage their individual OKRs and view all OKRs within the organization
- Learn more about roles and permissions in Viva Goals
Change management considerations:
- Adoption of the OKR format to track goals and priorities
- Microsoft Teams adoption if you plan to use Viva Goals in Teams

Get started planning for your Viva app

Now that you’ve reviewed popular uses for Viva and the basic requirements and considerations before getting started, it’s time to dive into the details.

If you're a Microsoft 365 administrator, you can use the centralized Microsoft 365 admin center experience to access guided setups for deploying Viva. Learn how to set up Microsoft Viva.

Get more information about each app and how to get started.

Viva app	Description	Getting started resources
Viva Connections	Inform, engage, and empower - Microsoft Viva Connections is your gateway to a modern engagement experience designed to keep everyone engaged and informed.	Overview Learn how to set it up
Viva Insights	Balance productivity and wellbeing – Provides data-driven, privacy-protected insights and actionable recommendations that help everyone in the organization work smarter and achieve balance.	Overview Learn how to set it up
Viva Learning	Accelerate skilling and growth – Your employees can easily discover and share everything from formal training courses to internal company resources.	Overview Learn how to set it up
Viva Engage	Support meaningful relationships and help your employees build valuable networks.	Overview Learn how to set it up
Viva Goals	Connect teams to your organization's strategic priorities to unite them around a shared mission and purpose.	Overview Learn how to set it up