Microsoft Launches Viva Engage, A Facebook-Like App For The Workplace

Microsoft will today launch Viva Engage, a digital employee experience platform that leverages the power of Microsoft 365 to deliver personalised information, insights, and communication to users.

Viva Engage is a new portal coming to the Teams communication app that will give co-workers the leverage to share video stories that would document their activities. The new app is very similar to Facebook in outlook, and like the Meta Inc owned app, it encourages social networking at work.

Microsoft had on the 19^th of July, 2012, purchased Yammer, an enterprise-focused social networking platform for a whopping $1.2 billion. Exactly ten years after, the Bill gates founded company is consolidating on building Yammer’s strength: with the promotion of digital communities, conversations, and self-expression in the workplace.

The difference in Yammer and Viva Engage is that the latter appears like an extension of Share Point and Office, the latter is more like a Facebook replica.

Viva Engage has a storylines section, akin to the traditional Facebook news feed, while it features conversational posts, videos, images, and more.

Viva looks and feels just like the Mark Zuckerberg-owned app, with its clear design framed to have the similar feel to allow use it to share news or even personal interests.

The multinational technology corporation has for the past decade been focused on building something similar to Viva Engage and it appears its initial investment in Yammer was a fore-runner to it building communities within organizations that uses Office. The integration of Yammer into SharePoint, Office 365, Dynamics, and Skype couldn’t have produced the desired synergy and thus the birth of Viva Engage.

Viva Engage is expected to also include Stories in its purview, something similar to the ones found on Snapchat and Instagram. Stories in Viva Engage will give employees to share just as they can on Instagram, and users won’t have to follow co-workers on Instagram to be able to share moments like vacation photos et al.

The new app offers users another method of creating a community within an organization, and it is expected that Microsoft’s Teams integration and its focus on consumer-like social networking could make it more successful than previous trials.