Viva Engage even has Instagram-like stories.
Microsoft is now launching Viva Engage today, a new Facebook-like app inside Teams that encourages social networking at work.
Viva Engage builds on some of the strengths of Yammer, promoting digital communities, conversations, and self-expression in the workplace. While Yammer often feels like an extension of SharePoint and Office, Viva Engage looks like a Facebook replica. It includes a storylines section, which is effectively your Facebook news feed, featuring conversational posts, videos, images, and more.
As such, Microsoft Teams has been increasingly positioned as the hub for work and communications at Microsoft, and the pandemic has certainly sped up businesses’ transition to hybrid work and the need for apps like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Slack. Teams is now the natural point where employees communicate and share for many businesses and has increasingly become its own form of a social network for many employees running Teams channels.
Ultimately, Viva Engage offers yet another way to create a community within an organization, and Microsoft’s Teams integration and focus on consumer-like social networking could make it more successful than what it has attempted in the past. It’s hard not to imagine that Viva Engage was created with Facebook Workplace in mind, or Workplace from Meta, as it’s now branded.