As we continue to innovate and enhance Microsoft Viva, we’re excited to share a glimpse into the future of Viva Amplify. Our commitment to providing a centralized platform for orchestrating and managing campaigns and communications remains strong, and we’re thrilled to announce new features and capabilities that will roll out in the coming months. Some of these features are geared towards corporate communicators as well as empowering anyone who needs to communicate to their teams, projects and stakeholders. We have more coming for Frontline Managers also that we’ll share at a later date.

Accelerate Copilot adoption with pre-built campaigns

Last month, Amplify added the Copilot Deployment Kit which includes 8 pre-drafted communications to help organizations plan, communicate, and adopt Copilot. And now, to help with broader adoption of Copilot across the various Viva applications, we’re adding a new Viva for AI Transformation pre-built campaign to help corporate communicators and change management leaders with their AI transformation efforts by highlighting specific capabilities within each Viva module.

Admins can choose to leverage the Copilot Deployment Kit and/or Viva for AI Transformation pre-built publications.

The Viva for AI Transformation campaign includes 10 pre-drafted communications and a campaign brief with objectives and key messages. Each communication can easily be edited, reviewed, and published to multiple channels—including SharePoint, Outlook, and Teams— highlighting the specific AI capabilities available in each Viva module and how employees and the organization can benefit from them.

Pre-built campaign helps showcase how Viva apps can be used for AI transformation

Copilot in Viva Amplify Editor

We’re bringing the superpowers of Copilot directly into the Amplify editing experience to revolutionize the way you create and enhance content by providing you with a writing assistance for all your communications. Simply click the Copilot icon for help with content, style, rewrites, and tone. Copilot in Viva Amplify will be available in preview soon.

The Auto rewrite option quickly brings good suggestions to you based on the text you’ve already entered. Or use it to pick specific enhancements like using more concise or expansive language.

Moreover, Copilot will help you adjust the tone of your content to ensure a consistent tone across all your content or make your messaging more coherent so it resonates better with different audience segments. With this capability, you will be able to adapt your content to various tones, whether you need a casual tone for social messages, an engaging tone to compel and draw in your audience or a professional tone for business communications.

Required Approvals

Like Lists and libraries, campaigns can contain sensitive information, such as marketing campaign budgets or human resources initiatives. The required approval feature brings compliance, accountability and workflows to Lightweight Approvals in Viva Amplify. By enabling required approval for a campaign, stakeholders can ensure that all campaign content and associated publications adhere to organizational standards and receive the necessary approval before publishing, thus minimizing risks and errors.

You can require approval at the campaign level so that all Viva Amplify publications within the campaign go through the approval process before the content is published. This is an optional setting that a user can choose to apply to a campaign. By requiring approval, organizations can apply a significant level of quality and security to their content, ensuring every piece of content aligns perfectly with their standards and expectations.

Required approval is targeted to be generally available in August 2024.

Campaign goals

Coming soon, you’ll be able to define the goals and objectives of a campaign within Viva Amplify and track progress against these goals using campaign goals. Goals establish a clear path for a campaign, guiding every action and decision, and providing benchmarks for measuring progress so you can achieve your campaign objective (s). In this coming release, Viva Amplify will support goal tracking for the unique viewers metric integrated with analytics capabilities. When you set a campaign goal in the brief, it will be applied at the campaign level for all publications and published distribution channels. By setting specific targets, you can track progress and determine whether the campaign is meeting its goals for all distribution channels. Campaign goals empower you to make informed decisions and adjustments as needed throughout the campaign.

Copy a publication

Gone are the days where you must rewrite or manually copy and paste content from an old publication to a newly drafted one to reuse it. Soon in Viva Amplify, you will be able to copy a publication within an existing campaign with just a few clicks. This new feature streamlines the content creation process, enabling you to easily reuse existing content – across SharePoint, Outlook and Teams, including all channel specific customizations and related audiences – and saving you time and effort so you can be more efficient.

Switch quickly between content editing, channels and writing guidance

Coming soon, you will see the SharePoint content pane also available in Viva Amplify. The content pane serves as a convenient hub for various panes that support authors in crafting their publications. This centralized space now features a user-friendly toolbox that enables authors to easily explore and insert content for creating dynamic and captivating publications and incorporates other useful panes like configuration tools and design ideas. Additionally, and specific to Viva Amplify, it also hosts the distribution channel selection, writing guidance, and audience selection specific to the distribution channels. With this change we are also introducing the ability to add or remove channels directly from the distribution channel tabs.

Streamlined Authoring Experience in Teams and Outlook

Coming soon, we are rolling out updates to the editors for the Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Teams distribution channels, to streamline previewing and editing. You will see the new editing experience when creating a new publication as part of a new or existing campaign and select to publish to Outlook and Teams. The new experience will enable you to customize the content for Outlook and Teams using a supported set of familiar web parts directly from the main drafting experience and improvements for loading content into the editor.

In addition to the changes to the canvas for preview and customization, you will be able to select the audience for the channel on the right side of the screen, independent from the editing canvas. You will continue to be able to switch between Preview and Customize and send test emails to verify how the published email is received in the different Outlook clients or is posted in Teams.

The streamlined authoring experience for Teams and Outlook channels will be rolling out in August and September.

The Viva Amplify screen below shows the new Outlook editing experience. Audience selection is now cleanly separated on the right panel, enabling you to focus on content only in the center.

Analytics

Reporting and analytics are a crucial piece of the Amplify value, and soon you’ll be able to go even deeper into engagement and capture new metrics. In the images below we’re showing designs because we want to illustrate the breadth of capabilities coming.

Let’s go deeper on how effective your campaigns and communications are with these new metrics and capabilities, including:

Audience Breakdown and organizational pivots – see engagement filtered by role, department, or other user information.
Campaign Brief Integration Amplify Analytics provides visuals feedback to campaign owners of progress as measured against the goals set in the Campaign Brief.
Trend graphs and simpler layouts – visualize data over time with easy-to-read charts
Reactions – understand the social gestures of the reactions you’ve received on your publication and the entire campaign
Export to PowerPoint – you can already download the reports to CSV, and we’re making it quick to present your communication progress in slides
Click through rate – see the performance of links and read rates within your publications.
Dwell time – understand how long viewers are spending viewing your publications
Multi-value queries – queries allow the user to selected multiple different Org metadata values combined with endpoints to created “and” queries that provide a deep context and understanding.

Viva Engage integration

Already in Private Preview, this is one of the most requested features is the ability to publish from Viva Amplify to Viva Engage communities and storylines. Analytics signals for Engage distribution are already included in our existing reports in private preview. We’re listening to preview customer feedback to improve the experience for the next version. Top requests such as support to publish as Articles in Engage and across multiple communities are already being looked at and we appreciate getting your feedback on what is most important to you when publishing to Engage from Viva Amplify.

Looking Ahead

As we build upon the success of Viva Amplify, we’re eager to hear your feedback and involve you in shaping the future of our platform. Stay tuned for more updates and get ready to amplify your communications with Microsoft Viva.

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