Omnia and Microsoft Viva working hand in hand
Are you curious about how Microsoft Viva can help your organization to an improved employee experience? Then you also might want to consider how Omnia can support you in that ambition from an intranet stance.
For years, organizations have established intranet solutions to empower their workforce in daily work, driving productivity, building engagement, and forming corporate culture. When Microsoft launched Microsoft Viva earlier this year, people within IT, communication, HR, and business development experienced somewhat of a disruption – will this mean that “we have to reconsider our digital workplace”?
For Omnia, one of the leading intranet products, this was more of a chance to further integrate with the Microsoft stack and to lead the way for organizations that want to prepare for the Viva initiatives. Below you will find more information on how Omnia and Microsoft Viva can work together to improve intranets, the digital workplace, and the employee experience.
Microsoft Viva - an employee experience platform
In February 2021 Microsoft launched the Viva offering with a positive response from the market. The Viva services were presented as an employee experience platform with capabilities in areas such as engagement, learning, wellbeing, and knowledge discovery in daily work.
The Viva offering covers four applications, which surface within Microsoft Teams:
- Viva Connections is focused on improving internal communication by connecting a SharePoint home site to Microsoft Teams.
- Viva Learning is a portal for surfacing learning modules including LinkedIn Learning, Cornerstone, SAP Success Factors, Coursera, and plenty of other vendors.
- Viva Topics is based on Project Cortex and is an AI-driven service that connects information and people to web pages about common business terms – topic pages.
- Viva Insights consists of wellbeing resources and metrics for both employees and managers.
Viva Topics requires an additional license plan and that also goes for manager’s metrics in Viva Insights. In most cases, Viva Learning demands additional agreements with learning vendors while Viva Connections presently doesn’t drive further license costs.
Improvements going forward
Of the four services, Viva Connections and Viva Topics have been commercially released, while the other two are in preview phases but pushing for general availability within the upcoming months. Microsoft is also driving improvements and additional services to the Viva applications.
For Viva Connections the improvements are focused on the launch of a desktop app, updates to the mobile app and dashboard plus making partner-built apps with integration to business systems available.
Enhancements of Viva Insights include further templates to improve the way managers coach, empower and connect with employees. Also, new wellbeing and mindfulness content and tools have been launched.
Regarding Viva Learning the vision is to enhance the API that will enable connection from further learning partners. The message is that Viva Learning will be an extensible platform and further APIs are expected to be available during the upcoming months.
For Viva Topics, Microsoft is pushing for a tighter connection to terms and term sets within SharePoint and also a possibility for people to opt-in to be a part of Topic cards.
Omnia and Microsoft Viva
The Omnia Team is following the work to improve Microsoft Viva and the suite roadmap closely. Even though our customers have not yet started to use the Viva applications to any larger extent, we have decided that Omnia will be integrated with Viva to help customers make the most out of both products.
Today, it is possible to use Omnia to establish a world-class intranet based on Microsoft 365. Customers can then connect the full intranet experience to Microsoft Teams, or cherry-pick important intranet features that should be available as Microsoft Teams Apps. But it is also possible to have a SharePoint home site as the start page of an Omnia solution and then use Viva Connections to connect the intranet to Microsoft Teams. So, it is possible to use Omnia for enterprise communication, sophisticated publishing, governance, and web content management, etc., but in parallel use SharePoint and Viva Connections for the integration with Teams.
Image: Intranet start page in Microsoft Teams
Omnia supports setting up a learning center within an intranet and publish and administrate internal training sessions and courses. It is also possible to create and publish micro-courses in Omnia, short web-based step-by-step courses with knowledge checks, course rating, and more. As soon as Microsoft makes APIs available, all learning sessions in Omnia will surface in the Viva Learning app and thereby make internal training as easy to find as courses from external parties.
Image: Micro-course in Omnia
In Omnia, you can set up and define terms and structures in the Enterprise Glossary and use these to explain common terms within the organization. This feature can also be used to build dynamic navigation such as clickable organization charts or to use for filtering in lists or search results. The terms that you manage in Omnia can be synchronized with the AI-driven pages in Viva Topics to make your solution a combination of structured and managed information and AI-generated content.
Image: Our organization in Microsoft Teams
Omnia can also offer complementary wellbeing services to the reports available in Viva Insights. The Microsoft initiative can provide automated metrics, but customers can also build a better understanding of workforce status by collecting information from employees using quick polls and surveys.
Image: Survey in Omnia
Omnia is seamlessly integrated with Microsoft 365 and the ambition going forward is to make the product even better in this regard. Omnia's tight connections to SharePoint, Teams, Yammer, Planner, Stream and other applications are guaranteed also for the future – and as stated above this also includes Microsoft Viva.
Omnia and Microsoft Viva will work tightly together over the upcoming years, helping customers to get the most out of their digital workplace. Please contact us for a discussion and demo of how Omnia can help you get more out of the Microsoft products.
