Introduction 

Recently, we had one of our favourite customers ask us this question;

“We have Microsoft 365 E5 and we can see some of the Microsoft Viva products, but how does that differ from what the Microsoft Viva Suite license gives us?”.

It is a great question!

In this article, we are going to delve into the Microsoft Viva licensing and try and explain what you do and don’t get when you have one of the Microsoft 365 licenses that include Viva.

Caveat:

This guide was up to date at the time of writing on 18^th December 2023.

What products are in the Microsoft Viva Suite?

So, the Microsoft Viva Suite has the following products in it:

• Microsoft Viva Amplify
• Microsoft Viva Announcements
• Microsoft Viva Connections
• Microsoft Viva Engage
• Microsoft Viva Glint
• Microsoft Viva Goals
• Microsoft Viva Insights
• Microsoft Viva Learning
• Microsoft Viva Pulse
• Microsoft Viva Skills (Preview)
• Microsoft Viva Topics

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What are the Microsoft Viva Products that I get with Viva in Microsoft 365 license?

When we talk about Microsoft 365 licenses with Microsoft Viva we are talking about the following:

• Microsoft 365 Business Standard
• Microsoft 365 Business Premium
• Microsoft 365 E3
• Microsoft 365 E5
• Microsoft 365 A3
• Microsoft 365 A5

The following Microsoft Viva products are accessible with the above licenses.

• Microsoft Viva Connections
• Microsoft Viva Engage
• Microsoft Viva Insights
• Microsoft Viva Learning

Each of these products has two tiers with a standard and premium feature set. This article will try and explain what the differences are.

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Microsoft Viva Connections

Microsoft Viva Connections connects SharePoint with Microsoft Teams and allows your organisation to bring in a Microsoft 365 Intranet into Microsoft Teams to make it easier to access.

Overall, the feature set that you have with the standard version of Microsoft Viva Connections is the same as           the premium version. Except for one key difference, you cannot have multiple Microsoft Viva Connection Dashboards unless you have the Microsoft Viva Suite license.

This feature allows Microsoft Viva Dashboards to be targeted to different groups of users to that they see the information and tools that are specific to them.

This allows scenarios such as Microsoft 365 environments with different companies in a group or different divisions to have their own landing page.

Figure 1 – Example Microsoft Viva Connections Dashboard

Microsoft Viva Engage

Microsoft Viva Engage is provided as part of the Microsoft 365 license and it provides a way to build a more informal community with forums and conversations which are much wider than Microsoft Teams can achieve.

The idea of these communities is to bring together like-minded individuals to share their knowledge, insights, expertise and/or enthusiasm for a topic.

Microsoft Viva Engage allows people to ask questions, suggest polls, start discussions and more. However, there are limitations in the reach of these features with the standard license but the tool is still very powerful.

The premium license allows the organisation to capture frequent asked questions and answers which are crowd sourced through Viva Answers in Viva Engage. These answers become part of the corporate knowledge base and integrate with Microsoft Viva Topics.

The leaders in the business can share their knowledge, and insights through Viva Engages storylines which is a fantastic way to have business leaders being able to engage with the rest of the organisation. Particularly when using the Viva Engage mobile application, they can record a 2–3-minute video to update people.

Finally, the Leadership corner allows the community to be able to connect to the Leaders who have been identified within the business to increase the reach of the story lines.

All these tools come together to help the people feel more connected with the business and with the people in the business. This helps them to feel supported and able to support others and breakdown barriers between departments, divisions, and teams in the business.

Microsoft Viva Insights

Microsoft Viva Insights provides insights into how you are working. There are two versions of Viva Insights standard and premium. The standard license provides insights into how you are working and your personal insights.

Your personal insights include for example how much time you are spending responding to emails outside of your work hours. Also, the features such as reminders as to when you said you would send someone something but have yet to do so.

However, there are no insights provided about how you are working with others, for example do you need to schedule a 1-2-1 with a team member or someone you manage. Features such as focus time and learning development time are not provided which will schedule regular times for you to focus to get things done.

For more information see the Microsoft Viva Insights further down.

Microsoft Viva Learning

Microsoft Viva Learning for the standard license provides access to a base set of learning and development resources found in LinkedIn Learning.

Additionally, it does allow you to connect to your own learning catalogue using Microsoft SharePoint as the host of this content which is a useful way to discover training courses.

However, more sophisticated functionality such as extending learning to third parties like Pluralsight, and  Success Factors is not possible.

The Microsoft Viva Suite

The following products which make up the Microsoft Viva Suite are as follows.

Microsoft Viva Amplify

Microsoft Viva Amplify enables businesses to improve how they communicate with their employees around specific campaigns. The people who might use the tool are Internal Communications, Marketing, Senior Management and Project and Programme communication professionals such as Project Managers.

The tool provides insights into the reach of communication and helps the communicators to increase readership and deliver their message across Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Teams (through SharePoint) and Microsoft Viva Engage.

Microsoft Viva Insights

Microsoft Viva Insights allows managers and Human Resources to get a view of the Well-being of the people within the organisation.

The platform provides insights into working habits to help improve wellbeing and protect people’s time outside of work hours. Additionally, it helps improve people’s productivity by comparing and giving people insights into how they work and how their behaviours impact others.

The application requires a minimum of 20 people to be part of the organisation’s work and the more data that it can use the better insights are gathered and presented.

Microsoft Viva Glint

Organisations are keen to understand the feeling and sentiment in the business and Microsoft Viva Glint is the tool that allows organisations to ask questions and get a glimpse into the feelings within the business. The idea of the tool is to allow measurement and tracking of those key questions which present the people’s feelings towards the business so that the management team can take action and improve the score. The aim is to improve staff retention and culture within the business and nip issues in the bud quickly before they become a wider issue.

Microsoft Viva Goals

Microsoft Viva Goals is a tool that follows the OKR framework that organisations such as Google, Intel and Spotify have used to drive growth and it provides a way to give people focus and align their behaviours and activities to support the overall objectives and goals of the business.

The O or Objective is a goal that the business is looking to achieve. The KR or Key result is the method of measuring whether the objective has been achieved. The OKRs are created at a business level and then departments, teams and individuals are assigned OKRs which support and link to the overall business objective.

The platform allows the monitoring and measurement of these OKRs which roll up to the overall business OKRs. This gives people insight into how they are helping the business meet its objectives and gives them purpose and drive as they can see how they are directly influencing the OKR.

OKRs are often project-based in that there are tasks and activities that need to occur for the Object to be met. These can be tracked in Microsoft 365 tools such as Planner but also other 3^rd party tools such as Asana and Trello.

Viva Goals asks for people to check in to keep the key results and objectives up to date on a regular basis.

Microsoft Viva Learning

Microsoft Viva Learning is a portal to learning and development. There are two parts to the product, and it is possible to create your own learning and have it available through Viva Learning. However, through subscriptions with Learning Management Systems and training providers such as LinkedIn Learning, Pluralsights, LMS365 and more you can expose, share and create learning paths for people within your organisation.

Microsoft Viva Learning comes with additional curated content from LinkedIn Learning as well as providing insights into modern ways of working, management and other business skills to support your team’s development.

Microsoft Viva Pulse

Microsoft Viva Pulse is similar in some ways to Microsoft Viva Glint, except that it is aimed at the team manager. The platform aims to help managers of people whether that is a team manager or project manager get insights into the sentiment and feeling of a team.

The tool allows managers to create questionnaires and send them out to get an idea of how the team is doing. The tool provides examples of questionnaires being used across the business world so that you can start getting value from the platform straight away.

Microsoft Viva Skills

Microsoft Viva Skills is currently in preview, but it is the next step in the evolution of the Microsoft Viva Employee Experience system. Whilst Microsoft Viva has benefits concentrating on the employee experience whilst at the organisation.

The tool integrates Microsoft 365, Microsoft Graph and LinkedIn Skills Graph to build up these insights.

Microsoft Viva Skills provides HR with insights into the skills available and required within the business. This allows the HR team to be strategic with their workforce planning. The planning that takes place, ensures that the organisation can plan to have the right skills to achieve their business goals and objectives.

Microsoft Viva Topics

Microsoft Viva Topics is an incredible tool and we love at iThink 365. This tool will be changing its name and likely becoming part of the Microsoft Copilot suite and allow people to discover the knowledge and information in the business throughout the Microsoft 365 platform.

Using AI and Machine Learning, the tool creates Topics which are subjects that are important to the business. The tool not only discovers the topics, and content around the topic but also the people who are subject matter experts.

The tool requires curation and suggests Topics which need to be curated and published by the knowledge managers inside the business.

The topics are discovered in Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Outlook and soon to be in the Office applications as well. This tool is great at getting new starters and employees up to speed with the business, processes, and terminology.

With the introduction of Copilot for Microsoft 365 and integration into the community, tools such as Viva Engage are becoming an essential tool for businesses. In particularly those that want to scale without reducing the quality of service to their customers.

Current Microsoft Viva Licensing

The following section provides a table of what you get for each license.

Please note that this information was correct at the time of writing in December 2023.

The latest Microsoft Viva Licensing can be found here.

Employee Experience Platform Plans and Pricing | Microsoft Viva

Product	Microsoft Viva in Microsoft 365	Microsoft Viva Communication and Community License	Microsoft Viva Workplace Analytics and Employee Feedback	Microsoft Viva Suite
Viva Connections	X*	X		X
Viva Engage	X*	X		X
Viva Amplify		X		X
Viva Insights	X*		X	X
Viva Glint			X	X
Viva Pulse			X	X
Viva Learning	X*			X
Viva Goals				X

* This provides a subset of features found in the full version provided by the premium licenses

Conclusion

Microsoft Viva licensing is a complex business, but we hope we have helped you find and understand the suite, licenses and what is available in which tool.

Of course, we are here to help so please reach out if you need more information or something that we have said does not make sense to you.

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