Microsoft Viva Learning Preview Available to Teams Subscribers -- Redmondmag.com

Microsoft Viva Learning Preview Available to Teams Subscribers

By Kurt Mackie
04/26/2021

Microsoft Teams paid business subscribers can now opt into getting access to a "public preview" release of the Microsoft Viva Learning application, according to a Monday announcement.

Viva Learning is one of four applications in Microsoft Viva, which is Microsoft's new "employee experience platform," introduced back in February. The Viva platform brings together existing and new communications and human resources capabilities, which get surfaced as applications within the Teams collaboration solution.

Microsoft described Viva Learning as creating a hub for learning within Teams, allowing the discovery and sharing of content libraries within an organization. Back in February, Microsoft described the content libraries that were available in the private preview version as LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn and "third-party" content from Skillsoft, Coursera, Pluralsight and edX. Organizations also can use their own content libraries.

Microsoft expects other third-party content to arrive later this year in Viva Learning from Cornerstone OnDemand, Saba and SAP SuccessFactors.

The Viva Learning preview apparently isn't delivering any new content libraries or feature additions, or they weren't described. Microsoft's announcement mostly described the steps on how to get the preview

Request Process
If Teams paid subscribers want to use the Viva Learning preview, then their IT support team will have to actively request it. However, the Viva learning preview currently is not available to Education and Government tenancies.

IT departments in organizations will have to fill out a form to request access to the Viva Learning preview. It can take "a few weeks" between submitting the form and gaining tenant activation.

When the Viva Learning preview gets activated for an organization, the IT department will be empowered to enable it for either the whole organization or just a part.

"In the Teams Admin Center, your IT admin will have the ability to configure who within your organization has access to the Viva Learning app in preview -- this can range from the entire organization to just a small subset of users," Microsoft's announcement clarified.

Microsoft is aiming for a "general availability" (GA) commercial release of the Viva Learning app sometime "later this year."

Other Viva Apps
So far, the only Viva application that has reached the full GA release-status milestone is Viva Topics, which originally started out as a Project Cortex effort for surfacing information in topic card-like formats, based on Microsoft Graph information.

The Viva Connections app, which surfaces SharePoint Online Home Sites within Teams, is still at the preview stage. However, its PC client product reached GA status back in late March, with mobile client support yet to arrive.

Viva Insights, another Microsoft Viva application that tracks how employees spend their time, is still at the preview stage. However, three new capabilities were added to it last week.

About the Author

Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.

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