UPDATED 13:09 EDT / FEBRUARY 04 2021

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Microsoft extends productivity portfolio with Viva employee experience platform

Microsoft Corp. today debuted Viva, a platform that enterprises can use to provide their employees with access to company news, educational resources and other types of work-related content.

The product could put Microsoft in a better position to address what it describes as the $300 billion employee experience market. 

Viva is designed to play a similar role as traditional corporate intranet platforms. To set the product apart, Microsoft has added in artificial intelligence features to help employees extract more value from company-created content and analytics features aimed at managers.

Viva is made up of several components. The first is Viva Connections, which functions as a sort of homepage that displays corporate announcements and updates, as well as explainers on topics such a company’s product portfolio. Workers can also access internal forums hosted on Yammer, another Microsoft intranet product.

Viva Learning and Viva Topics are two additional tools included in Viva that enable users to view educational resources created by their company. The former tool provides access to professional development resources, such as courses on how to manage Azure cloud environments, while the latter is a knowledge base portal. Both tools offer third-party product integrations that allow companies to import content from external platforms such as Coursera.

Microsoft has applied its AI know-how to Viva in a bid to give the platform a feature advantage over rivals. Viva Topics, the knowledge base component, automatically organizes articles using AI and surfaces relevant content to users while they’re working in Office applications. For example, if a worker is viewing a marketing document about one of the software products offered by their company, Viva Topics can bring up an article explaining that product’s features. 

For executives, in turn, the platform offers an analytics module that Microsoft says provides a high-level view of employee wellness. Viva can in some cases also generate recommendations on how to address areas for improvement. 

“Today, organizations spend over $300 billion a year on employee experience,” wrote Jared Spataro, the corporate vice president of Microsoft 365, the Microsoft product portfolio that includes Office. “That number includes employee development and training, benefits and wellbeing, and a whole host of employee experience technologies. But too often, these technologies are fragmented, hard to find, and disruptive to the flow of work.”

Spataro said Microsoft thinks there’s a need for a new approach enabled by a new category of technology solutions he calls “employee experience platforms.”

The Viva Topics component of the service for sharing news and other company information is available today. The analytics module is in public preview and Viva Learning is in private preview.

Thanks to Microsoft’s massive enterprise installed base, Viva is rolling out with a large addressable market from the outset. The platform could add more momentum to the growth of Microsoft’s Productivity and Business Processes segment, which includes Office, Dynamics and LinkedIn. The segment saw sales rise 13% last quarter, to $13.35 billion, and was part of the reason Microsoft’s total revenue topped the average analyst estimate by about $3 billion.

Image: Microsoft

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