Microsoft announced the next big leap forward in the Microsoft Teams ecosystem, once again putting Microsoft Teams in forefront as the modern workspace experience.  With this latest set of improvements, Microsoft looks to improve Teams to an employee experience platform(EXP).  Integrated into Microsoft Teams will be four new experience improving technologies and services.

• Connections
• Insights
• Learning
• Topics

Customers have often asked, “Where is the right place for information, communications, collaboration and how do I effectively use the Microsoft workloads like Yammer, SharePoint, and Teams?”   Our previous answer was to utilize the right tool for the right situation.  No longer.  If you are not thinking of Teams as the application(s) that users will spend their day in, let us help you to be prepared.   Let us take a look at each one of these areas announced.

Connections

Making employees feel connected is a bigger challenge in this modern and often remote workforce.  Connections takes the best of your company portal, intranet site or whatever technology you used to communicate to your employee and plants it firmly in the Teams navigation pane.   Front and center for your employees to stay connected and informed.

Insights

Going beyond the analytics of how you employees work, this is a personal insight into how you can understand and improve your work schedule.  The integration into other services such as Mindspace to build into our workday things such as meditation breaks speaks to a much-improved employee experience.  I think it is key to understand these are employee specific insights that are only exposed to the employee.  While managers will have some insight into their team, Microsoft is keen to point out that specific data will be anonymized and aggregated. 

Learning

We must learn to survive in these days of constant change.  The best companies invest in their employees learning which helps those organizations develop and retain key talent.  Integrating learning into your workday is a great way to reenergize and feel accomplished.  Microsoft is bringing in not only Microsoft learning and Linked In learning but is partnering with many other third-party learning providers.  Managers will be able to assign and track assigned training.

Topics

Microsoft called it like “Wikipedia with AI Superpowers”, but I look at as the next evolution and integration of Delve into Teams   Microsoft points to all the time that is spent searching for and recreating information, which from their research is up to 7 weeks per year.  To put that time back in our calendars for more productive efforts, Topics will surface cards bringing together people, projects, products, documents, and videos as employees work in Office, SharePoint, and Teams.   

This is always an exciting time, Pre-Ignite announcements like this for one Viva are just the tip of the iceberg.  These additions to Teams are currently at varying levels of readiness. Microsoft does a great job of announcing, delivering an initial release with a bevy of features and integrations in a fast follow to initial release.  We look forward to helping our customers get the most out of the Microsoft Teams ecosystem.  Check out the official Viva blog.

If you’re looking to bring these features to your organization, contact us below.