Social tools are a great way to collaborate, especially in a work environment. You can get your team up to speed on projects, share progress, encourage discussion, and ensure everyone’s on the same page.

Microsoft’s version of this is Yammer, a social tool for work. They recently announced Viva Engage, which replaces the Yammer Communities App in Teams. But it has left people confused. Is Viva Engage replacing Yammer? And with some organisations still not seeing the value of Yammer, will Viva Engage have a place? Let’s take a look.

What is Yammer?

For those who don’t know, Yammer is a social media platform that allows employees to communicate, collaborate and share information. It’s an internal communications tool that helps companies keep employees up-to-date on company activities.

Yammer can be accessed on a browser and has the same feel as a forum where you can scroll to see new updates from colleagues. My organisation uses Yammer for praise, customer feedback, new exam updates and general social events. We have banned company-wide emails and replaced them with Yammer.

Yammer has a feature called Communities. Yammer communities are groups of people who come together around a specific topic. They can be open to everyone (public) or invite-only (private). The content in these communities is typically generated by the members of the community itself, not Yammer itself.

Yammer can be added to the Teams taskbar as an app called “Communities”, so you can receive Yammer announcements via Teams notifications and access the feed and communities through Teams.

What is Viva Engage?

Viva Engage was announced as the latest addition to Microsoft Viva in July this year (2022). Viva Engage is an exciting new tool that helps you and your team stay connected and engaged at work. It’s available via Microsoft Teams and Outlook as part of the Microsoft 365 software suite, so it’s easy to add to your workflow.

In addition to having all the features you’d expect of a social media platform like news feeds, profiles, and the ability to post images and videos, Viva Engage also has storylines and stories that let users connect with colleagues in unique ways.

With stories, you can share your thoughts on current events or personal interests in an open-ended format that allows anyone on Viva Engage to comment or react as they see fit. These conversations are not limited to single posts; instead, they form a continuous thread of thought that can be viewed by anyone who follows your profile page or searches for your name in the search bar at the top of any page within Viva Engage.

Viva Engage is available to customers licensed with Yammer and is included in most Office 365 plans.

Is Yammer replacing Viva Engage?

Viva Engage will replace Yammer in Teams, but it lives on the web and native mobile apps. This means you can continue using Yammer Communities in Teams—and now you’ll have access to new features that make it easier to connect with others and find a sense of connection at work.

Can I use both?

Viva Engage is not replacing Yammer, so yes, you can use both. You can access Viva Engage through Teams and use the web version of Yammer and the mobile app to view and access the same feed.

The ability to translate languages is a crucial requirement for organisations that must host meetings in multiple languages and collaborate with colleagues in different countries worldwide.

Microsoft has a few features that enable people to translate notes, Teams messages and even meetings.

Translate a Teams chat or channel message

This feature enables you to translate messages in Teams chat or channels to the language you have set in Teams. For example, if your language in Teams is English and someone sends you a message in French, you can translate that message to English.

To do this, click on the ellipsis next to the message and click translate:

If the conversation has been translated, you will see this indicator to the right of the time stamp.

You can return to the original message by clicking on the ellipsis again and clicking see original.

Turn on live captions to translate a meeting

You can now use Live Captions to translate your Teams meeting live. Live captions now support 27 languages and use AI-powered technology. When you turn on live captions in a meeting, they only apply to you and not the entire meeting. So only you can see the captions, and no other participants are notified that you have them on.

To turn live captions on in a meeting, click on the ellipsis in your meeting tool bar and scroll down to find the live captions button:

When the captions are on, you will see them at the bottom of your Teams window:

To translate the live captions, click the ellipsis on the bottom right of the Teams window and change the spoken language. Teams will then bring you a drop-down list of languages to choose from. 

Choose your language and hit confirm. Teams will now translate the captions. In the example below I am speaking English but can see Dutch captions:

Pretty cool! You could be delivering a presentation in English and have participants from different countries translating your presentation live into several different languages simultaneously.

Translate your meeting transcript

During any Teams meeting, you can start a live transcription of the proceedings. The text appears alongside the meeting video or audio in real-time, including the speaker’s name (unless they chose to hide it) and a time stamp. Now, you can translate the transcription live.

To turn on the transcription, click on the ellipsis in your Teams toolbar and scroll down to start transcription.

This will open the panel on the right with the transcription. To translate it, click on the ellipsis at the top and select your language. 

In this example, I speak English but translate my transcript into Italian live. You can download the transcript as a word document after the meeting.

Other translation features to check out

There are some other translation features I recommend you check out. OneNote has an immersive reader which enables you to translate whole pages to other languages. PowerPoint Live has a translation feature. Microsoft offers apps to help translate live meetings, for example, Group Transcribe and their translate.microsoft.com website, where you can do real-time translation during meetings.

In the past, Microsoft designed their technology to make employees as productive as possible. Microsoft tools like Teams, SharePoint and Office are built with great productivity features, which gets employees doing more in less time. 

Recently Microsoft has shifted gear slightly by investing in technology that focuses more on employee wellbeing. The pandemic helped fast-track this by showing how people work better when they are happier and have a better work/life balance. 

One of the significant products that Microsoft has released is Microsoft Viva, an employee experience platform. Here are four reasons why you should care about Viva. 

1. Happier employees are more productive

Several research studies have established the connection between employee happiness, employee engagement, and employee performance.

Viva helps create a healthy work environment, builds a sense of workplace community, and helps employees improve their work/life balance. These factors are significant to ensure employees feel valued, engaged and happy.

2. Retain your best people

Replacing employees is expensive. Advertising your company to future candidates, interviewing, onboarding, and training take many hours. This creates a high cost for your organization. 

Microsoft designed elements of Viva to improve employee wellbeing, ensuring your employees are engaged and happy, reducing the loss of a good person, knowledge and skills they take with them. 

3. Microsoft is investing in employee experience

Microsoft released Microsoft Viva in 2021 with four modules. Already in the last few months, they have added two more modules to Viva and a Dynamics integration product. Microsoft\’s investment in Viva should show just how important they think it is and how technology is shifting towards people. Keeping up with the changes in technology means keeping up with the changes in culture. 

4. Some of Viva already comes with Office 365

Many elements of Viva come with Office 365 licensing, so chances are you already have the technology in place. Viva Connections, Viva Engage and some features of Viva Learning and Insights come with Office 365, so you can use the technology you are already paying for.

Microsoft has added a new feature to Teams chat that lets you view a person’s LinkedIn profile directly in Teams. When you open a chat history with someone, you can click on a LinkedIn tab, find that person and connect with them. This is only available for people inside your organisation, but it will soon be updated for all contacts inside and outside your organisation.

If you don’t want your LinkedIn profile to others via Teams, you can turn off the LinkedIn and Microsoft connection from your LinkedIn profile under Settings and Privacy. You can also decide how private your profile is to others from LinkedIn privacy settings.

I can see how this would be useful; for new employees to get skill and bio information from colleagues, an easy way to see someone’s content and links, or to grow your LinkedIn connections without needing to leave Teams. I haven’t used the LinkedIn tab much, but I have clicked on it when someone new has started at my organisation. It will become more valuable for me when I can connect to people outside my organisation, like Microsoft contacts or customers.

Microsoft held their latest Inspire conference in late July 2022, and as with every year, they have announced some new and exciting new features and solutions to Teams. Here are the ones I am looking forward to most!

1. Viva Engage

Viva Engage is the newest module to Microsoft’s Viva suite, which Microsoft announced last year. Viva Engage is a social app that builds on the existing capabilities of Communities, which is an app used in Teams to connect Yammer.

Viva Engage is a way for employees to share news, culture, feedback and have conversations and is a great way to share announcements and build communities, all within Microsoft Teams.

Viva Engage will be part of most Office 365 and Microsoft 365 licensing and will be released later this year.

2. Shared Channels in Teams

Shared Channels were announced a while ago but are now in general release, so we should see them coming to our tenants soon!

The flexibility of shared channels allows you to collaborate with parties inside and outside an organization and work effectively as an extended team without switching tenants. Users can add guests and collaborators to the shared channel without needing to be added to the entire Team. They can only see information within the channel they have access to.

Shared channels allow you to:

• Engage in collaboration with members who are not members of the team.
• Providing a secure and deliberate means of sharing files, holding conversations, meeting, and reviewing documents without switching tenants.
• Maintain your work flow by using shared channels from outside your organization alongside your own channels.
• With Teams, you can collaborate with external partners in other Azure AD orgs, just as you would with colleagues within your own.

3. New chat features

There are a few new chat features that Microsoft has announced. Two of which I love, one I am not so keen on. The one I am not too fond of is the new emojis. I think they look intense and terrifying, but I’m sure I’ll get used to them!

The other two features are pretty useful:

1. Video clip – the ability to record a short video message and send it via Teams chat. I can see this being useful when trying to explain something that doesn’t need a whole call, or if someone is busy, it might be easier to leave that person a video explaining your point or question. This feature is coming out in September 2022.
2. Chat with self – this feature is already available, but I find it helpful. Chat with self is a way for you to send a short chat message to yourself. The chat is pinned at the top, so you can easily find it. I use OneNote, but sometimes I need a temporary quick number or note that doesn’t have a place in a OneNote page or section. Chat with self is one I’ll be using!

4. Collaborative Annotations

Collaborative annotations enable you and your Teams meeting participants to collaborate and annotate the screen while you share in Teams. When you turn on annotations, participants will see the Microsoft Whiteboard toolset at the top of their window with the ability to use laser pointers, pens, sticky notes and more. 

This feature comes in handy when working on design, slides, documents, etc. Collaborative annotations is available now as part of the Teams public preview.

For more information on Inspire announcements, check out the tech community blog: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/microsoft-inspire-2022-innovations-coming-to-teams/ba-p/3559351

Last week I attended a 3-day Prosci Change Practitioner course in London. The course was excellent; it opened my eyes to the importance of Change Management and provided me with the tools to implement a change management strategy. It was a jam-packed three days, with lots of helpful information and tips, but here are my top 4 learnings:

1. Change is hard

Change is hard. It\’s human nature to resist change because of perceived risk or fear. Nevertheless, change is something we also desire and strive for. Whether the change involves abandoning a bad habit, developing a new skill, or making a significant life change, we have all experienced the desire to make a change in our lives.

Managing change in a business setting is no different. Employees, managers and even business leaders resist change. Most projects that we do involve people changing how they do their job. This means that change management is highly crucial to achieving success.

2. Sponsors with the most authority are not always the best.

Managing change begins with executive sponsorship and senior leadership. By giving the change credibility, authorising funding and resources, and performing critical employee-facing tasks, they play a crucial role in the success of the change.

A sponsor is someone who will be active and visible throughout the project, help communicate the change to employees and is someone who will commit time to participate in activities such as training and workshops. You want someone influential, but not necessarily at the top of the org chart. A sponsor can make or break a change project, so choosing the right person is essential. Look at who the sponsor influences, their connections in the organisation, and their commitment and stake in the project\’s success.

3. You\’ll rely on your people managers more than you think.

In most cases, change also impacts how people managers carry out their work. How can we expect a people manager to support a change if they aren\’t on board?

People managers are going to be involved consistently throughout any change management project. They will help communicate the change, encourage their teams to go to training, help manage resistance, and provide feedback to the project team.

Don\’t overlook people managers; get them on board, and you\’ll have a much more successful change project.

4. Change Management should be part of any change project – not just technology change.

One of the biggest takeaways from the course was that change management should be part of any change, not just technology change. As someone in IT, most projects are about tech and getting people to use technology. In the course, there were people from all roles and backgrounds. Their projects included new systems but also projects like moving office locations, remote working, and a change in mindset or change in the process.

Change should be planned and managed in any project that requires some change to ensure the project\’s success.

Summary

The Prosci change management course was excellent, and I highly recommend it to anyone looking to embark on a change project. You get a considerable amount of resources and interactive lessons and can share the experience with people from different backgrounds and industries.

Viva Topics is one of the five modules in Microsoft Viva, which Microsoft released in 2021. It acts as a Wikipedia for business by presenting business users with a Topic card when they see a word or acronym they don’t recognise. Topic cards can be found in SharePoint online and will soon be available in Teams and Outlook.

Topic cards will provide information about the Topic, including files and sites related, a description, and people who know about the Topic and related Topics. Topics help employees understand what it means and who is involved. A good use case for Topics is an organisation that runs many projects, as your project names can be Topics. Law firms may also find use with legal terms and cases as Topics.

How are Topics created?

Topics are created by a mixture of Microsoft’s AI and people in your organisation who have the “knowledge manager” role. AI will create Topics as a first draft, and employees can choose to add to them or remove them if they are irrelevant.

You can assign a few roles to help manage Topics in your organisation. Those roles are:

• Manage topics: Can confirm and reject topics, typically knowledge managers.
• Create & edit topics: Can edit and create new topics.
• Topic viewers: See information on topic pages, search results and topics in SharePoint pages.

This helps ensure Topics are up-to-date as employees are working day-to-day.

Topic Centre

Knowledge Managers can manage Topics in the Topic Centre, a SharePoint site where users can view, manage and create topics. Each user will have a bespoke view of suggested topics relevant to them based on what they do in Microsoft 365.

From here, knowledge managers can see if a Topic has impressions and choose to approve or remove Topics that the AI has suggested.

The Topic Centre is where employees can view the full details of the Topic and even update it as they go.

Topics will become available in Teams chat, channel messages, and Outlook emails later in 2022. This means I can find the correct information wherever I am working at the right time.

How do I get Viva Topics?

You can purchase a Viva Suite license that includes all of the premium Viva features across Insights, Learning, Topics and Goals if you want to use all of Microsoft Viva. Viva Topics is an additional license cost of £3.00 per user/month. Each user will need a license if they want to view Topics.

Breakout rooms can be helpful for collaboration and discussion of the meeting. Breakout rooms are sessions that are split off from the main Teams meeting. They allow the participants to meet in smaller groups and are completely isolated in terms of audio and video from the main session.

Since Microsoft released their breakout room functionality, a few changes and additional features have been added to make the creation and management of Breakout rooms easier. One of these changes is the permissions.

Who can Create Breakout Rooms?

To create breakout rooms, you must be the meeting organiser or a presenter who has been appointed a breakout room manager. External users cannot manage breakout rooms; they need to join the team and change their role to Presenter.

Who can Manage Breakout Rooms?

The meeting organiser can assign breakout room managers to help manage participants and rooms while in the meeting. To assign a breakout room manager to all breakout rooms, first make sure they are a presenter in the Teams meeting settings.

Then assign them as a breakout manager for all rooms. Click on the settings cog under the breakout rooms tab in the Teams meeting and assign from there.

If you want presenters to be able to share their screen and not be a breakout manager, miss the 2nd step and add them as a presenter under Specific people in the meeting options.

Who can Present in a Breakout room?

By default, anyone in the breakout room can present their screen. This includes external and guest users. You can change the presenters for each breakout room by selecting the three dots and then the settings cog for that breakout room.

This will open the meeting options for that particular breakout room, enabling you to add specific presenters. You will need to do this for each breakout room.

What can Attendee’s do in a Breakout Room?

By default, attendees can share screens, come on camera, unmute and use the meeting chat. These are settings you can customise in the meeting options.

If an attendee gets stuck, they can @mention the organiser or breakout room manager in the breakout room meeting chat. This will notify the organiser even if they are not in the breakout room.

Turning on a nice feature is the return to the primary meeting room setting. This enables attendees to return when they want to.

You can do this as a Breakout room manager or organiser. In the meeting, click on rooms, then the settings cogwheel. This will open the settings and allow you to turn the toggle to let people return to the central meeting.

For more help with Breakout rooms, check out the Microsoft website Use Breakout Rooms in Teams Meetings.