Mcd79

On September 2022, Jared Spataro and Satya Nadella held an online event that talked about the impact to employees in these troubled times. Using the insights Microsoft gathers as anonymised productivity signals and through their 2022 work trends report, it was clear that the gap in perception of productivity between leaders and employees is large, the expectations around why to come to the office is all about the social connections and now is the time to re-energise your teams through re-recruitment.

With the general availability of Viva Goals at the start of August 2022, many people have been wondering what the benefits are. The honest answer is that the majority are to do with the OKR (Objective Key Result) framework that Viva Goals helps organisations to implement it but the tools are just part of the equation. This blog post looks into some of the challenges that OKRs along with Viva Goals look to address.

Viva Sales is the latest pillar announced by Microsoft but why is it there and what does it suggest to the future of Viva?

Beautiful city, great speakers, all the Microsoft content, plenty of drinks - that is the way to spend a couple of days. At the start of June, I was one of the over one thousand people who attended the Scottish Summit in Glasgow, a Microsoft Community event that has been running for several years now but was the first year back in person since the start of the pandemic. Here are a few of my thoughts as I head back home.

“In 2022, a crack community unit was sent to Microsoft for some contracts that they couldn’t commit. These people promptly got together, not escaping from Teams, to explore the world of Microsoft Viva. Today, still wanted by the community they serve, they survive as collaborators of fortune. If you have an employee experience problem, if no-one else can help and, wherever you can find them…maybe you can hear from the Viva Explorers.”

A few days ago, Microsoft announced that they were acquiring Ally.IO, an OKR company. Now Microsoft has made quite a few acquisitions over the years but what was interesting about this one was that it announced as the service that would power the next Viva module. It had been heavily hinted that the first four pillars (Connections, Topics, Insights and Learning) would not be the last ones and here it is, the focus for the next release.

On 15th and 16th September, I spoke at my first in-person conferin almost two years and it was so incredible to be back with real people. The organising team have been through so many rollercoasters with this conference so seeing everything come together was so so heart warming. Here are my key takeaways from the event.

Do you know what Microsoft Search is capable of? It has so many options for Answers but it can often be hard to see samples of this. To help with this, I have created a GitHub repo of search samples that you can use to import and get started faster.

I'm getting bored of some tweets. You know the ones. "Here's another unsolicited message". I'm bored of these because in 2021, these shouldn't be needed. The unsolicited DM should not be sent. End of story. People shouldn't have to share these Tweets, because we live in a world where we respect each other, especially women. But this isn't about everyone, this about how men treat women online.

Have you heard, the Immersive Reader is now available to use with pages on SharePoint Online as part of Microsoft 365 so that you can improve the accessibility of content to readers of news and other content in your tenant. In this post, I will cover the importance of the Immersive Reader and what it can do for your users.