The Morning Cuppa, October 2022

A note from Alex...

Morning, Seeing as it's almost Halloween, I was going to open with a skeleton joke, but I thought you might not find it very humerus...

Anyway...a couple of months ago we shared the announcement of Viva Engage and a brief dive into what it is. The main concerns and queries from our community were centred around how Viva Engage sits with Yammer, and the relationship between the two. We've taken those queries and produced an easy 'how-to' guide to help you get started with building communities using Yammer and Viva Engage. You can check it out in the shared content below.

We've also included some tips on a question we get asked almost every day - how to make SharePoint look good. There's no shying away from SharePoint's design limitations, but there are ways around it.?

As always, if you have any questions, ideas, suggestions or queries, please just give us a shout.

Building Communities with Yammer and Viva Engage

Viva Engage hasn't replaced Yammer - but it does play a central role in the Yammer experience. Get clued up on how Viva Engage and Yammer can work together to help you build solid communities within your business. Read the Guide.

How to make SharePoint look good

If you're struggling to create a well designed, engaging, branded SharePoint space, then you need these 4 quick tips. Find out how.

Finding Focus in a Hybrid world

Eliminate 'focus fog', avoid virtual overload and protect your time with this guide to finding focus in a hybrid world. Tell me more.

Martin's Corner

Updates, useful tips and new things from Microsoft 365 to help you Work Happy, with Silicon Reef's Principal Consultant, Martin Day.

This month's Microsoft Ignite event saw a whole host of announcements around Microsoft 365. I've included a whistle stop tour of some of my key takeaways.?

Viva Insights: Meeting Effectiveness Surveys

Meeting Effectiveness Surveys will be displayed at the end of select Teams meetings with five or more attendees, making it easy for participants to give feedback. Results and recommendations will be available in the Viva Insights app, and can be used to make improvements to your virtual and hybrid meetings.

Viva Learning: Learning Paths

Create sequenced groups of training and learning resources and make them available to employees as part of a Learning Path. Learning Paths can be accessed, recommendation and shared within Viva Learning, and will help give structure and focus to training and career development.

Viva Learning: Learning Collections

Learning collections will allow employees to create personal collections of learning content aligned to their interests or learning goals. Collections will give employees autonomy over their learning outside of assigned pathways, and can encourage learning outside of day-to-day responsibilities.

Microsoft Teams: Places App

Microsoft Places is a new workplace app designed to optimise spaces for hybrid working. The app will show things like who's in the office and who's working remotely, which workspaces colleagues have booked, and how employees are feeling about hybrid policies. Places will help bridge the gap between in-person and remote working worlds.

Microsoft Teams: Premium

Teams Premium is an add-on to the traditional Teams app. With meeting guides, branded meeting experiences, intelligent meeting recaps, AI generated tasks and tons more, Teams Premium will make meetings more personalised, intelligent and secure.?

Microsoft Teams: Channels

Microsoft is improving the design of the Teams channels experience to be more intuitive and engaging. You'll notice changes like the message compose box moving to the top of the screen, the ability to pop-out conversations and new post types.

Microsoft Loop App

The Microsoft Loop app is designed to help teams think, plan and create together, and enables seamless collaboration across apps. The announcement at Ignite was that Loop is now in private preview - so you might be able to play with it soon.

Microsoft Loop: Components?

Components are a core part of Loop and two new components - Polls and Q&A - were announced at Ignite. Microsoft also announced that components will soon be available in more places across Microsoft 365, including Word for web and Outlook.

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