MICROSOFT VIVA SUITE - UPDATE
About the author: Jonathan Stuckey
Audience: Project managers, Solution designer, Platform / Cloud Architect, Change manager
Update of Microsoft Viva suite announcements
As we rapidly approach the end of 2024, there have been some interesting developments with the Viva suite, which is a good indicator that Microsoft is starting to apply the pruners to the suite with the lack-lustre reception of some of the products.
Early in 2023 we did a brief review of Viva suite, and its approach with brand-marketing vs. cohesive functionality and as announcements through this year have shown, while there's some awareness of how they want these products to work in concert there was a lot of 'throw everything at the wall and see what sticks' going on.
Microsoft's strong start into the Employee Experience sphere stumbled and has been largely overtaken with Gen AI-washing everything with Copilot branding. Along with weeding-out the weaker offerings and merging in capabilities elsewhere, we are left with a fairly obvious suite of functionality aimed squarely at Employee management. Although there are still a few areas of duplication and overlap that I think need rationalisation, I suspect they will continue to have a shake-out through 2025/26.
Product changes and retirements
Over the last 18-months the shake-up in Viva has been quite dramatic and wide ranging. Below is a brief view of the changes in landscape...
Dead
Viva Topics - dead in all but name since Copilot leapt to the fore in 2023, with too much manual intervention required, and little to no support without paying an extortionate cost for SharePoint Premium (née Syntex) which requires an exhaustive amount of intervention to get a useful result. With its official retirement pending, Feb. 2025, it was the first to go but took a while to hit the ground.
Viva Sales - The writing was on the wall pretty early with this one with Microsoft openly killing-off the module in favour merging and rebranding under Copilot banner as "Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales", its already a desiccated corpse, interred since July 2023.
Viva Answers - Announced in 2023, and more or less died so quickly most people were probably never aware it existed. Lacking any product pulling power, it was merged into Viva Engage Communities functionality in November 2023, where there was a natural fit (and significant overlap/duplication) of features and it sits under the Business social / community networking tools.
Viva Goals - Its funerary announcement this week was a bit unusual, with lots of activity in the roadmap, and releases throughout 2023-24, and still projected releases through first half of 2025. Only thing for this is why publish announcements and roadmap in Nov, to officially kill the product in December - with a 12-month off-ramp. This effectively killed any new or incremental sales revenue, extended rollouts or deployments
Wounded
Viva Amplify - while originally off to a great start, if a lost in the noise of Pulse, Insights and Engage, Amplify has had a good cycle of releases, but the roadmap is looking very sparse. If I was to hazard a guess, I can see Amplify being subsumed into a module like Viva Connections because it's geared for content creation and mgmt in campaigns and Connections is about bringing content to single UX for the users.
Viva Pulse - I am going to take a punt and say I think one will be on its way out and will be merged into other technologies. There has been a solid roadmap, but if Glint doesn't get merged into Pulse then Pulse should be merged into Glint. There is just too much overlap. We will be providing a 10,000-foot comparison for quick assessment in future article.
Viva Connections - hard to get a read on this one because it is obviously the play for structured app experience UI instead of SharePoint and Webparts. There is life in this module and Microsoft has released some enhancements over last 12-months, but the roadmap is weak and the updates are cleaning-up other things released ages ago - and integrating other modules and tools - there is no obvious vision for it even after Ignite
Healthy
Viva Engage (née Yammer) - Surprisingly this long-running scrappy fighter is seemingly on its way back with some serious investment in functionality clean-up and integration. As Yammer it always had a strong toolset and other than the 5-year period where Microsoft bought it and then wasted a perfect opportunity to take Business Social Networking head-on, it is well suited to communications hub for Employee Engagement experience.
Viva Learning - Looked nice to start, had frankly poor investment in first 12-months, is now taking big steps in released integrations, extensions and LMS linked solutions. Its updates and roadmap are strong, with a natural extension for Employee Engagement support. It's likely to keep moving forward with: Integration with your own content, Learning Pathways (Microsoft product self-service content), and new extensions support user Learning Records are good indicators.
Viva Insights - Because of the nature of Insights and that it is be linked to monitoring and tracking health of people, activities etc. mean this module should (in theory) have a long-life. Its increasing ties to Copilot in recent announcements, and integration from PowerBI and Automate for multi-service analytics and the data-modelling approach show in the strong roadmap of releases and planned updates in 2025
Viva Glint - there's a significant roadmap of genuine features that are not the "Copilot opt-out" type of investment by Microsoft. Where we struggle is the range of overlap in functionality in Pulse, Amplify and Engage which are all geared towards user engagement, surveys and analytics. Because of the investment in analytics in Glint and extensibility of the module, it's probably the preferred option as lead-module.
Viva suite enhancements
Apart from the expense of paying for an additional suite of tools, and dependency on Microsoft Teams to deliver most of the module user experience, there have been some good strides in the underlying approach with the suite:
Unification of service (URL) and suite's home UX
Unification of admin user experience a location
Consistency of delegated role-based administrative access
With the rationalisation and culling of the weirder components which didn't fit a vision of "Employee Experience and Engagement" (i.e. supporting company and employee health), we actually have an (almost) cohesive set of capabilities which I would see having investment in over coming years.
Pricing
Pricing is still poked, and Microsoft Viva product team do not seem to get that while each module may only be $2 - $6/p/p (on average) - when you add these up with the cost of:
Microsoft 365 business plan license per user
Microsoft Teams (now separate license) per user,
additional Power Platform / Automate run-time cost and now
Microsoft 365 Copilot license per user
...the cumulative cost is not cheap. This is probably why Microsoft has announced bundling Viva Insights licenses as part of Microsoft 365 Copilot per-user license earlier this year and is now connecting Viva Pulse to Microsoft 365 Copilot dashboard.
Questions
This review has thrown up lots of questions about the roadmap, integration, dependencies for the Viva suite. Below are just some of the questions we at Spoke have, and dont have very good answers from Microsoft today:
Are we likely to see more consolidation or deprecation of modules?
Are we likely to see a pricing change, given reduction of available modules in suite?
Are we likely to see increased dependency and cross-over with Copilot to drag-through Viva?
What are the key ones for support, and useful functionality?
...
Ultimately the answers would depend on cohesive vision, but Engage, Insights etc are strong options for any organisation using Microsoft 365, SharePoint and Teams, even allowing for Connections having some weakness. The other modules are down to your specific situation, and Microsoft is busy pruning these back
There are some clear benefits and useful capability, and the Freemium-model employed will continue to provide a stepping stone to Viva suite of Employee Experience capabilities, but in time of careful cost-management the balance between extended investment in software vs. tangible investments in staff are going to be a tricky one to balance.
Conclusion
If you want to drive staff and user engagement, and minimise development overheads, then Viva as a Employee Engagement platform is improving. For strongly people-oriented organisations, that focus on culture and engagement, the suite coupled with content management in SharePoint are a significant toolset, and the obvious advantage is its hooked into Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Office apps and Outlook for email, calendaring etc - this is frankly a massive plus other EE platforms struggle with.
Word of caution: If Employee Engagement and Experience is part of your operational strategy, you should look at the range of platforms because Microsoft Viva suite is the basic level of EE platform, and should not be compared to others like SuccessFactors, BambooHR, ServiceNow, Workday etc - because the suite is not comprehensive or joined-up.
For the users its relatively straight-forward user experience and toolsets are simplified to the point Viva modules are quite easy to use and engage with.
For the SME or business owner of functions like People & Culture looking to drive engagement with Pulse or Learning, there's a lot of setup which needs to be done plus coaching on day-to-day operational running. If you want to extend the Insights, you will need exec and leaders to engage and understand their obligations in driving its use. This is not a toolset which you click-go and you are done. Its about change management and continual reinforcement for both operator and consumer on 'what good looks like'.
You will need to plan accordingly and be willing to invest in the organisation over an extended period.
Next?
if you have questions about the practical application of Viva modules as a way to engage users and want to understand how these might fit into your intranet and Employee Experience strategy - give us a call.
About the author: Jonathan Stuckey
Comments