Is Microsoft’s Viva Engage a TikTok for the Enterprise?

By Jim Lundy

 

Microsoft announced Viva Engage last week at Microsoft Inspire conference. Viva Engage is all about enhancing the vision play experience by allowing short videos to be shared with others. This blog discusses the overall trend of video engagement within the enterprise which we call TikTok for the enterprise.

What is Viva Engage?

 

Viva Engage is part of the Viva Employee Experience platform. It allows managers and employees to connect and share best practices. To us this seems like a reinvention of Microsoft’s first generation application for social networking called Yammer, but Yammer is really a community platform. 

Viva is specifically designed for employee experience. Viva is also targeted at Business Leaders, where Yammer was really an Intranet replacement. You could say that Employee Experience (Aragon calls it Employee Engagement) is really Social Networking Gen II.

Storyline and Stories – TikTok-like features

The Storyline feature of this new workplace social app is really a game changer. It allows people to express themselves and also share best practices with short form videos. It looks very close to what you would see in either Instagram Reels or TikTok. 

So we call this TikTok for the enterprise and Microsoft just beat all other Collaboration and Enterprise Video vendors to the market with Viva Engage.

It works with Microsoft 365 applications

Viva Engage doesn’t just work with Viva. Storyline works with Viva, Teams, Outlook and Yammer. To us, the only catch is you need to license Viva. Viva Suite starts at 9.00 per user per month, which to us is a reasonable price for what you get – including Viva Learning.

Bottom Line

Microsoft looks to have a big hit with Viva Engage.

Not only does it bolster the Viva Platform, which is targeted at Business Users, with Viva Engage, it makes sharing information fun and engaging. There are bigger implications for the Enterprise than just sharing. Aragon feels that micro video sharing (a form of micro learning) is the fastest way to share knowledge. We will be discussing all of this in a new Research note that will be available on the Aragon Insight Network (AIN).