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Microsoft Technology

Microsoft Launches Viva, Its New Take on the Old Intranet (techcrunch.com) 57

Posted by msmash from the for-what-it-is-worth dept.
Microsoft today launched Viva, a new "employee experience platform," or, in non-marketing terms, its new take on the intranet sites most large companies tend to offer their employees. From a report: This includes standard features like access to internal communications built on integrations with SharePoint, Yammer and other Microsoft tools. In addition, Viva also offers access to team analytics and an integration with LinkedIn Learning and other training content providers (including the likes of SAP SuccessFactors), as well as what Microsoft calls Viva Topics for knowledge sharing within a company. If you're like most employees, you know that your company spends a lot of money on internal communications and its accompanying intranet offerings -- and you then promptly ignore that in order to get actual work done. But Microsoft argues that times are changing, as remote work is here to stay for many companies, even after the pandemic (hopefully) ends. Even if a small percentage of a company's workforce remains remote or opts for a hybrid approach, those workers still need to have access to the right tools and feel like they are part of the company.

[...] Unsurprisingly, Viva is powered by Microsoft 365 and all of the tools that come with that, as well as integrations with Microsoft Teams, the company's flagship collaboration service, and even Yammer, the employee communication tool it acquired back in 2012 and continues to support. There are several parts to Viva: Viva Connections for accessing company news, policies, benefits and internal communities (powered by Yammer); Viva Learning for, you guessed it, accessing learning resources; and Viva Topics, the service's take on company-wide knowledge sharing. For the most part, that's all standard fair in any modern intranet, whether it's from a startup provider or an established player like Jive. Further reading: Microsoft CEO Nadella Bets Businesses Are Ready to Spend Big on Employee Software.
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Microsoft Launches Viva, Its New Take on the Old Intranet More

Microsoft Launches Viva, Its New Take on the Old Intranet

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  • In the meantime, the good old-fashioned mailing list still gets more stuff done right.

    It's not as fast as chat, which means people think about what they say, and it is faster than meetings, so it's efficient.

    The more they change the internet, the more the 1995 internet looks really optimal.

  • Who is this designed for? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DarkRookie2 ( 5551422 ) on Thursday February 04, 2021 @12:35PM (#61027714)
    I really doesn't look all the useful. It just looks like a poor attempt at a social media site.
    The only time I would access this is if I click on it by mistake in Office, or if my Manager forces me to use it. Which is just going to just lead to me bitching about for at least 30 minutes.
    • Yammer was a poor attempt at a social media site. I don't know what this is. I think they are trying to go after PeopleSoft. Without DCAA compliance, they won't get very far.

    • It just looks like a poor attempt at a social media site.

      So it will also bring all the issues of social medias within the employees? Polarization, easy outrages, incitation to violence, revolts against the employer, waste of productivity on cat videos, etc?

      So I'm not sure it's a good idea for a company to have something remotely similar to social media after all.

      • that's not really what this is about; this day and age it's still going to happen. your options as an employer are whether to have people organize, outrage, polarize, revolt, cat video etc. outside the employer's control, or within it. microsoft (which is clearly envious of facebook@work, as it should be) wants to give you as an employer at least a panopticum, to monitor the employees' social activity closer. let's see how many are going to bite.

    • I really doesn't look all the useful. It just looks like a poor attempt at a social media site. The only time I would access this is if I click on it by mistake in Office, or if my Manager forces me to use it. Which is just going to just lead to me bitching about for at least 30 minutes.

      As opposed to the intranet sites we're all used to.

    • Teams looks like a poor attempt to mimic communication and collaboration apps. Sharepoint looks like a poor attempt to mimic a documentation system. Yammer looks like a poor attempt to mimic a conversation app. And I could go on but I'm getting depressed since I'm forced to use these wannabe tools and struggle with them daily.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Wargames ( 91725 )

        Don't get depressed, go with the flow. Word was a poor attempt to mimic Word Perfect, Excel was a poor attempt to mimic Lotus 123 (or Rank and File) and Outlook was a poor attempt to mimic Lotus Notes, and Windows was a poor attempt to mimic the Mac.

        • I liked Lotus 123. It was easy to use, help was clear and understandable, and I could get complex stuff doen in it. Today Excel is an ugly mess and its help system is utter uselessness.

          It's like drinking water. Water is good enough and works well. You can improve it by removing impurities, but most out there these days try to improve it by adding flavorings and other crap to it or sticking it into branded bottles made out of petrolum byproducts.

      • This is the fact of Teams. It does nothing well.

  • Version Control (Score:5, Informative)

    by TechyImmigrant ( 175943 ) on Thursday February 04, 2021 @12:36PM (#61027718) Homepage Journal

    The big blob of microsoft 'services' has made its way onto our corporate intranet.
    You are supposed to be able to collaborate on documents held in a 'teams' space, instead of say git, svn, or emailing back and forth.

    Sadly they forgot to add version control. So we're doing it manually and no one know what the current version is.

    This is a nightmare.

    • There's supposedly version control in SharePoint. Don't ask me how to use it...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Entrope ( 68843 )

        From the little I've seen, it is terrible. It encourages lock-free checkouts and checkins without tracking base versions and without merge assist, so it's easy to drop your version of a file on top of somebody else's. It keeps some number of previous versions, but either the number or age of those are limited (at least on a compliance-oriented setup), so history is forgotten unless you keep it outside the revision control system.

        When you add a new file, depending on server configuration, you might be prom

    • In a lot of companies, Sharepoint has been brought in to replace the corporate intranet websites, the document management system, the Wiki, workflow systems... and it sucks at all of those jobs. Hard. Besides versioning, they forgot that sometimes files are very large, forgot about permalinks and document IDs, (and the notion of URL shortening). They also forgot to design a proper UI to replace whatever the hell it is they came up with during development. It's not even very cheap to run, in all cases I

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        To be honest this sounds more like a problem with your share point admins than anything.

        Versioning is there but it has to be enabled.

        The wiki is really pretty nice; not the most fully featured but if you are coming from something like Confluence its sill way fucking better.

        No sure what your issue is with linking, you can deep link to any document you like on sharepoint. URL and shorting is a non-feature, why anyone wants URLs that are completely opaque as to what the resource they might point to is; will re

      • In a lot of companies, Sharepoint has been brought in to replace the corporate intranet websites, the document management system, the Wiki, workflow systems... and it sucks at all of those jobs. Hard. Besides versioning, they forgot that sometimes files are very large, forgot about permalinks and document IDs, (and the notion of URL shortening). They also forgot to design a proper UI to replace whatever the hell it is they came up with during development. It's not even very cheap to run, in all cases I've seen it has been more expensive than the systems it replaced, both in required hardware and in terms of support effort. If this thing is as bad as Sharepoint (and it sure looks that way), don't even think about it. But hey, companies bought into SAP's lies as well...

        SharePoint does everything. It just doesn't do anything really well.

      • >In a lot of companies, Sharepoint has been brought in to replace the corporate intranet websites, the document management system, the Wiki, workflow systems... and it sucks at all of those jobs.

        For us, teams is replacing sharepoint. Sharepoint sucked majorly. Doing this nonsense through a web interface is one of the all time bad ideas. Teams is like sharepoint, with less functionality and a clumsy IM and video conferencing interface too.

    • Sadly they forgot to add version control.

      That's a feature. Win10 has shown us that nobody needs anything but the latest version.

  • Can't Find What You're Looking For? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Thelasko ( 1196535 ) on Thursday February 04, 2021 @12:40PM (#61027730) Journal
    Can't find things on your company intranet? Move over to Microsoft Viva! We combine the multitasking capability of Microsoft Teams, the organizational structure of Sharepoint, and the search functionality of Outlook, to create a vast abyss to throw all of your data.

    Rest assured, your data is safe in our cloud in a format that's unsearchable, unindexed, and uncrawlable! Unless you keep a text file full of URLs on your desktop, you will never find your files again!
  • This offering looks like the Microsoft Organization? If it does, is this good for its customers?

  • They're going to have people use that steaming pile? Might as well ask people to do their work on a 1990 Mac classic.

    Like many other things Microsoft has put out, it's slow, unresponsive, not intuitive and should be an embarrassment. Instead, it's put forth as a way to allow people to collaborate. Which is the last thing it does.

    • They're going to have people use that steaming pile?

      I don't like Sharepoint, but people do use it.

      Yammer, on the other hand... does anyone actually use it? Somehow it got turned on here at UW, and I was apparently automatically added to some team or another. But there doesn't appear to be a way to extract oneself! I ended up just flagging every automated reminder email as "spam" - now I never see them (except when I peruse my spam folder to look for mis-routed email).

      • Wayyyy back when some jackass signed me up for Yammer, the first thing I did was figure out how to turn off the email notifications. Its web interface had the typical gear icon under which you could find the setting. But it's likely that's changed and/or yours was configured to not allow users to opt out.

        But yes, quite a few use it, mostly for cheerleadery corporate nonsense.

        • Yup. I'd done this before, but just now I opened a private window and logged into Yammer. When I go to communication preferences, I am told "Your organization has turned off this feature". When I go to the overall list of Office apps, I am told I can't revoke Yammer's permissions.

          Thanks, UW!

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          The only people I know who use it in my large company are upper level execs and managers who post about how they made their own sourdough or joined a virtual marathon and those who feel the political need to congratulate them. Nobody down at the engineering level touches it. It's only for the people who get excited about going to all hands meetings (even the ones without cookies).

  • I am guessing this is more recycled sharepoint plus one or two bits tacked on. Sharepoint always struck me as the biggest pile of software garbage ever to gain significant traction, even exceeding MS’s previous piles of shit (word, excel etc).it seemed to have more in common with some sort of Frankenstein monster software system, I.e. a lash together of bits designed to justify the continued existence of the aforementioned word, excel and PowerPoint. For reference I write documents in markdown, do c

  • I kind of expect this is the new Microsoft business model: keep spitting out new hybrid front ends (aka shit sandwiches) made up of the same old crummy back end components.

    I think Teams would have been a lot more interesting if it wasn't just a new and more confusing way of front-ending old backend services.

    • Crummy back-end components, crummy front-end components, with a soft creamy center!

    • Microsoft survives for the same reason most enterprise software survives: The purchaser is not the user. Some VP says, "You can't get fired for choosing Microsoft", which is still inexplicably true, and the people actually having to deal with it have no say in the matter.

  • Yes, my company has been praying for more Sharepoint integration. Our admins have threatened to quit if we do not use more Sharepoint . . . or was it the other way around?

    • It is hard to tell, because "threatening to quit" and "sharepoint" often end up in the conversations.

      There are so many sharepoint hate websites out there, and some of those sites are really "how to convince your users to use sharepoint even though they rightfully hate it" :-)

  • Embrace and extend is back again. It will work wonders. As long as everything else you run at your company is Microsoft.

  • Does it have easy to make Forms and Workflows? Because combining Microsoft Forms and Microsoft Flow is clunky at best and non-functional at worst. There are a million intranet tools and most of them suck. Bring something of value, make process automation easy.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Intranet, that uses Office365? Doesn't sound very intra to me.

    • Re:Comment (Score:4)

      by Darinbob ( 1142669 ) on Thursday February 04, 2021 @03:20PM (#61028372)

      I think in Microsoft land, "intranet" means it's in the Microsoft cloud but has your company name attached. Thus no one can see your company's data except your company, and Microsoft spies, and hackers, and China, and... well, just about everyone can see the data except for the people who need the data to do their job.

  • Viva, a new "employee experience platform"

    "Experience platform" is glowing red PHB/MBA-speak. Ruuun!

  • With all the Office O365 updates we have gotten at work Outlook as become TOTALLY UNUSABLE! Even my manager agrees he told me today he hates it worse than I do. Pretty hard to do It think.
  • Why build this when dozens of MS partners have built this already...

  • would have been a more appropriate name....not many men (apart from the occasional half second shot) in any of the advertising media I've seen.

    Guess that's what "equality" means....have the under-represented now completely dominate, instead of having a 50/50 balance. Go virtue signalling!

    Remember coders, 90 == 10 now returns True.

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