Microsoft today announced that it will retire the Yammer brand. The current Yammer product will become Viva Engage. Previously, Yammer Communities app in Microsoft Teams was branded as Viva Engage. With today’s announcement, all of Yammer will become Viva Engage. Apart from branding changes, there are no changes to the features, capabilities, and investments.
Microsoft confirmed that it will continue to enhance Viva Engage with new capabilities and some of them are announced today.
- Storyline Announcements for leaders
- Leadership Corner for employees
- Ask Me Anything Events
- Social Media #Campaigns
- Advanced Analytics
- Answers in Viva
Read about the above feature in detail below.
- Leadership Corner provides a space for leaders to connect with employees, showcase employee resource groups, and foster culture through discussions, storyline posts, events, and more.
- Leadership Corner also introduces a new event style in Viva Engage called Ask Me Anything (AMA) events to further drive engagement. AMA events modernize the standard town hall experience through upvoting, Q&A, and engaging discussion features like GIFs and images.
- Leaders and corporate communicators can also now create campaigns to drive key initiatives that support business goals and objectives. These campaigns are automatically pulled into Leadership Corner and include a dedicated campaign page, a visual Goal Tracker to measure progress, and the ability to showcase key sponsors and recognize top contributors.
- Answers in Microsoft Viva is now rolling out to Viva suite customers and Viva Topics customers as a new tab in Viva Engage. Answers utilizes Viva Topics and rich AI to surface and match employee questions to answers and experts, bringing collective knowledge to work for everyone.
- To better understand engagement within Viva Engage, we’ve added new Advanced Analytics that drill down into a variety of dashboards, including dedicated metrics for personal analytics, audience analytics, campaign analytics, and global answers. Customizable date ranges allow you to determine reach and engagement over time to provide a deeper look at what’s happening in Viva Engage.
Timeline for the branding change:
- February:Â You can expect an in-app rebrand banner to appear in the Yammer mobile app giving you advance notice of the change.
- March: The Yammer mobile app becomes Viva Engage. It’ll still be discoverable as Yammer for a while (e.g., in Apple’s Spotlight Search). Around the same time, the Communities app in Outlook will also be rebranded to Viva Engage.
- April:Â You can expect an in-app rebrand banner to appear in the Yammer.com web experience giving you advance notice of the change.
- Summer 2023:Â The Yammer.com web experience becomes Viva Engage, with a few UX/UI enhancements. The Yammer.com URL will remain for a while as the team makes additional backend updates.
- Later in 2023:Â Yammer.com URLs will be updated. We plan to support redirection for legacy URLs so that existing links and integrations continue to function.
