Microsoft unveils its vision of the future of remote work

Microsoft has released a new productivity platform to help managers and employees work better in the remote environment. 

Microsoft Viva comes as part of the Office 365 suite and integrates into the company’s Teams business communication platform.

Even though it works as an intranet – i.e. gathers all key business elements into a single location, Viva is split into four key categories – connections, insights, topics and learning. Connections is fairly self-explanatory and deals with internal communications, and is designed to be the first place employees log into. It features things like company news, town halls, or employee resource groups and communities.

Insights builds on Microsoft’s Productivity Score feature, which allows both employees and managers to keep track of employee patterns and trends. While each employee will only get access to their own data, managers will get an aggregated, de-identified version.

Learning is all about – you guessed it – employee training and upskilling, and will include content from LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn as well as each company’s unique educational material.

The final element, Topics, was explained to The Verge by Jared Spataro, head of Microsoft 365, as “Wikipedia for the organization”. By embracing AI, Topics organizes content and creates topic cards with data polled from various sources such as Office, Teams or SharePoint.

Viva has officially launched yesterday, and can be obtained through an Office 365 license. The company confirmed it will be adding extra features to Viva throughout the year.

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