Teams Real Simple with Pictures: The new Viva Goals RBAC role, and distinguishing it from the Organisation Admin role

I spoke recently at a Viva Goals AMA with fellow MVP's Karoliina Kettukari and Kevin McDonnell. And in addition to it being a lot of fun I got to tell a little bit about my story and how I got into Viva. This was via Viva Goals. I class myself as what I would call a second wave advocate of Viva. Why? Because the first wave with the initial four apps such as connections and topics seemed to just pass me by. I was too deep into Teams at the time. I was always, for some reason or other getting around to it. Indeed, it was the acquisition of Ally.io and phasing into the portfolio of Goals which which kicked things off for me, because in my mind Goals looked useful from a business perspective. To me, it looked useful in the same way Power BI is useful. It gave purpose, and direction, and evidence of making an impact. So I got hands on in the preview. I liked it. And then I did a bit of testing for Microsoft - particularly around its integration with Teams, I also attended the programs where I fed back a lot of asks on things like integrations, and one of those asks was to have a defined RBAC role for Goals. This is because there wasn't one in the same way there are other RBAC roles for Viva Apps such as Knowledge Manager, whilst at the same time all the admin controls were accessible to the person who set up the org. Whether it is for principle of least privilege, or decentralised administration there is a case for RBAC. But all is not as it seems and there may be some surprises for those into their Azure AD.

Teams Real Simple with Pictures: Viva Goals – Restricting Trials, Org Creation, Write Actions and Teams and Tags

This week I had an interesting conversation with a partner of ours who is currently doing a roll out of Microsoft 365 with one of their new customers. Like me they've been in the game for a while so the conversation was very open, fluid and candid. We discussed a few particular functionalities they were looking for. We also discussed things such as how the stack had evolved the last few years. But one of the interesting things they mentioned is that they felt Microsoft were beginning to put more advertising into their products. This interested me because over the past few months I am increasingly hearing similar things from others. Here are a few examples an increase in add-on/premium SKU's across the stack when E5 was supposed to be the all up SKU for everything. How panels are explicitly calling out trials. More services subject to self-service sign ups. More nudges and flyouts to use functionality in the portals and more services based upon Azure subscriptions and the consumption model as well as SKU's such as the Power Platform. Now, this isn't throwing shade on Microsoft. It was pretty much expected they'd develop a commercially harder posture and tack post-pandemic given a slowdown. The issue is this - in their desire for us to transact, to grow numbers and recoup on their acquisitions or engineering investments, it can create certain headaches for admins looking to perform controlled rollouts of services and a high level of governance. Viva Goals is an example we discussed where the partner is looking to roll this out in the near future. Assuming that trials aren't restricted in the tenant any user can sign up for it. Once signed up, multiple organizations can be created by anyone who is licenced. By default, anyone in Goals can create Teams, and Tags and export OKR's. In other words, admin's could be on the back foot if they don't take any governance actions and simply assign the licencing. So this one is for said partner: three ways to ensure better governance with Viva Goals. Completely optional, the choice is yours.

Teams Real Simple with Pictures: It’s here – the new Viva Connections Home Experience and how to transition from your SPO Home Site with PowerShell

Today has been a good one. A lot of security - Defender for Cloud, Defender for Servers, a bit of Sentinel then a bit more Defender for Cloud. A tidy up of the old DevOps tasks for the UX. Nice. So I thought I would spend this evening chilling out and putting on those a few Jeff Beck classics like Wired and There and Back. Closing down my Ring 4 tenant I noticed that it was finally there: the new Viva Home experience has landed. Now I don't mind telling you that I have had the PowerShell in place for about two or three weeks, and I have been checking back every single day because I have been looking forward to this ever since it was announced at the launch event prior to Ignite back in 2022. Before I implemented the PowerShell, or should I say before I became aware that it was executed on the command line - should a home site already exist in Viva Connections I spent hours - and I mean hours on a wild goose chase to see what could change it. Site Settings. The Microsoft 365 Admin Portal. The new Viva Admin Portal. You name it. For all new implementations of Viva Connections - as in never used before - the Home Experience should be there by default. But if you already have a Home Site transition is possible using PowerShell. Now, before we get all gung-ho, we may not want, or need, or have any inclination to move to the new Home Experience. That's fine - because should you not like it you can always switch back to the Home Site using PowerShell too. We'll cover this. But just a disclaimer on this one. I imagine that some organizations' Home Sites used for Viva Connections could be quite rich given that SPO Home Site configuration has been around for a while now. I want to say eighteen months but maybe it's two years. There could very well be some reconfiguration to be done when the transition via the shell is complete. For me, that rebuild/redesign and the sprints that inevitably result is all interesting work for the latter half of the week. But just a heads up, you may want to test it all out in a dev environment first - but all the better knowing we can reverse course.

Teams Real Simple with Pictures: Surfacing Stories within Viva Engage

After a few weeks of focussing on the transition to Infinigate and inner ring preview testing for various product teams at Microsoft, I don't mind telling you that it's mighty fine to be back with some bandwidth for doing the blog. I wish I could tell you that I have had some iota's worth of break during that time, but that would be a barefaced lie. My world has been consumed by DevOps, and Sprints, and scrutinizing UX, and the H1 schedule and programmatic changes such as Solution Partner Designations. But if you have followed this blog for any length of time, then you know that I think having a few weeks away every so often is typically a good thing. Absence makes the heart grow fonder and all. But in the world of cloud the bucket of content fills back up. So, this week I am going to talk about something which I don't often cover - and that is Viva Engage. Viva Engage, by definition, is a new employee experience that connects people across the company. It is driven by Yammer services to which Yammer is a part. It is also in the second wave of Viva apps of which we would also bucket Pulse, Amplify, Goals, Sales and all the others announced this year. Now, the functionality we will be specifically looking at today is called Stories. Stories - again, by the only definition I could find, is a 'modern, engaging way to capture the moment, with short videos or photos that are showcased in a stories carousel'. Think of content similar to Tik Tok and Insta ((videos and pictures) that followers of your own Storyline can view and engage with, and which your provide them as a richer experience. So, basically, something way out of my comfort zone but something I am looking to use in my own organisation

The Microsoft Viva Admin Experience is here

So, Viva? I haven't written a lot about it on this blog, have I? And when it's comes down to it that's probably because I spend a lot of my blogging time keeping up to date with Teams. But since Teams has been a bit quieter lately - at least in terms of the features I use or want to know more about I thought this would be an opportunity for something that caught my eye and something which is currently rolling out. This is the new Viva Admin Experience. Now, I am pretty much what you would call a second wave Viva advocate. I wasn't in with the first lot because I was just so focused on everything else Microsoft 365. And to be honest, the Viva apps which have been my ingress into both the Viva stack and the Viva community have been Goals and Sales, ones which I now use every day. Of course, prior to this I've deployed Connections many times - even when you had to create the Connections app via PowerShell, and setup and configured both Insights and Topics. I've even got a Viva course in the portfolio which has now been taught for over a year. But Goals and Sales gave me the bug, and now I do a ton of community work on Viva (albeit almost all directly with Microsoft). Needless to say, I'm very excited about all of the apps announced back in September - Amplify, Pulse, Answers and Storylines. It's a bright future. And with the rapid expansion it seems prudent to create an admin experience, where we'll likely see a set of granular role-based admin roles for the stack. This is because governance is important - and what we can refer to as horizontal experiences - functionality across the stack - will be important too.