Helping IT admins save time and effort managing Microsoft Viva

The Microsoft 365 Commercial Support team resolves customer support cases and provides support to help you be successful and realize the full potential and value of your purchase. Our support services extend across the entire lifecycle and include pre-sales, onboarding and deployment, usage and management, accounts and billing, and break-fix support. We also spend a considerable amount of time working to improve the supportability of Microsoft 365 services to reduce the number of issues you experience as well as minimize the effort and time it takes to resolve your issues if they do occur.

Today, we’re excited to share more about some of our supportability work with Microsoft Viva.

You may have seen this recent article on how Microsoft Viva helps businesses save time and money by improving employee experience and engagement to boost business outcomes. Whether it's locating information, accelerating new hire onboarding, or creating common views of objectives and key results, the employee experience platform delivered by Microsoft Viva helps organizations and the people in them grow and flourish.

As the solutions and benefits delivered by Microsoft Viva have continued to expand, our Microsoft 365 Commercial Support team has been learning and gaining new insights on the support experience across the suite. One of the areas we’ve been focusing on from a supportability perspective is helping IT admins save time and be more effective with their management tasks. In this post, we’ll take a closer look at some of the outcomes of that work.

Improving SharePoint integration with Microsoft Viva Learning

Integrating with SharePoint as a source of content for learning and development is one of the most widely used capabilities in Viva Learning. This allows admins to bring curated content into Viva Learning from SharePoint content repositories. Through support feedback and customer listening channels, our supportability team learned that admins needed a more integrated way to review, diagnose, and troubleshoot setup and integration issues between SharePoint and Viva Learning. Of particular importance was creating more transparency around underlying content sync and ingestion processes to help admins understand and resolve commonly occurring configuration issues.

Working in close partnership with the Viva Learning product team, the new Managing Providers feature was prioritized and rolled out last November. Using the Admin tab in Viva Learning, admins can now track the status of sync processes for SharePoint and investigate ingestion failures using the Export Logs feature.

An image demonstrating the Manage Providers feature from the Admin tab in Viva Learning.

Note: The Viva Learning Admin tab also provides additional capabilities for managing provider integration with other learning management systems and content providers available with a Viva Learning subscription.

Additionally, the team has made considerable efforts to strengthen the admin-focused documentation related to integration with SharePoint. This documentation and other self-help solutions are surfaced contextually during the support workflow in the Microsoft 365 admin center.

An image demonstrating how to get instant answers during the support workflow within the Microsoft 365 admin center.

Acting on customer feedback with the Viva Connections first-run experience

Through support feedback and customer listening channels, our supportability team also learned that admins wanted to disable the Viva Connections first-run experience. As part of the investigation, we learned about a technical issue with this feature tied to how users signed in or signed out of Microsoft Teams. This caused the first-run experience to appear each time the user signed in. The Viva Connections product team has since disabled the first run experience and is looking to bring back a new first-run experience in the future that will address the Microsoft Teams sign in/sign out scenarios.

Enabling deeper Viva Engage and Yammer integration with Microsoft 365

Significant governance, compliance, and security functionality has been added to the Viva Engage and Yammer platform in recent years, which has required admins to move to native mode. Through support feedback and customer listening channels, our supportability team learned about the top challenges for admins moving to native mode. We learned that customers wanted more control over when and how they moved to make the transition, and that they wanted improvements to planning content. In collaboration with the Viva Connections and Yammer product teams, we prioritized the issues to ensure that we could quickly deliver improvements for admins.

The product team has since created a process to delay automatic migration giving customers more control and answered questions directly on a live webinar. In the coming months, we expect there will be further enhancements to the automatic migration process, which will simplify the process for admins.

Providing admins with longer trial periods for Viva Topics

Through support feedback, preview programs, and customer listening channels, our supportability team also identified a top request for Viva Topics to extend the trial period. As we learned, customers asked for this to allow more time for machine learning to automatically identify topics. This was desired to enable a deeper evaluation and hands-on experience with Viva Topics. The Viva Topics product team has since granted a longer trial period, allowing for a 60-day trial, plus an extension. The maximum number of trial users was also increased from 25 users at initial release to 50 users.

In the coming months, we’ll be working to develop new Viva self-help and diagnostics capabilities using our customer diagnostics platform to further assist admins with setup, management, and usage. In the meantime, take advantage of the Viva deployment resources available with FastTrack, which include self-serve solutions as well as access to specialists and services for eligible customers. You can also use the Viva employee experience dashboard for step-by-step instructions needed to deploy Microsoft Viva modules for your organization.

As part of our ongoing supportability work, we’ve been honored and proud to give back to communities in need when you use a diagnostic tool to solve your issue through our Microsoft 365 Diagnostics for Social Good program.

We look forward to sharing more about our Microsoft Viva supportability progress and plans in future updates!

Brian Stoner is a Director on the CSS Modern Work Supportability team where he leads a team of technical and business program managers. 

Vikram Kartik Jindal is a Supportability Program Manager on the CSS Modern Work Supportability team focused on Office client and Microsoft Viva. 

Brian Lyttle is a Senior Supportability Program Manager on the CSS Modern Work Supportability team focused on Yammer and Microsoft Viva. 

Bryan Petersen is a Senior Supportability Program Manager on the CSS Modern Work Supportability team focused on SharePoint, OneDrive, and Microsoft Viva. 

The CSS Modern Work Supportability team delivers innovative self-help solutions and diagnostics, in-service enhancements, and support programs to help customers get maximum value from their Microsoft 365 commercial subscriptions and create an easy-to-use, connected support experience. 

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