Powell 365 ? Microsoft Viva

At Powell Software, we are super excited by the announcement of Microsoft new platform Viva.

In short we are convinced that Microsoft Viva + Powell 365 will bring a comprehensive Digital Workplace :

• for HR, with complementary use cases such as employee onboarding & gamification
• for end-users who want to choose where they get info in Teams, on their mobile app, on their Intranet
• for Comm who need a Digital Workplace that is fully branded to their company and that they can keep alive with continuous update
• for IT & partners who need a solution to scale & updates with very few dev costs

 Powell 365 value proposition totally fits with Microsoft Viva

Microsoft announcement makes the emphasis on the need for improving employees experience in their day-to-day activities as perceived by Human Resources. The requirement to address this topic has increased during the last 12 months turning out to be a huge market for ISV & Partners. So It fully confirms the vision that drives Powell 365: Hybrid Work implies more than ever the need for organizations to connect their employees through a Digital Workplace that embraces all paths from Communication in the Intranet to Collaboration in Teams, and all employees from Office Workers to Firstlines Workers. A Digital Workplace which also bridges with 3rd party business apps.

 Microsoft Viva includes 4 pillars Connections (existing SharePoint), Learning (new app in Teams), Insights (Workplace Analytics on Wellbeing) and Topics (previously Cortex, Search). Almost none if these new capabilities overlap with Powell 365 (Intranet and Teams)

• Searching documents and conversations in Teams or in the Intranet is often challenging : Topics will add a lot to our search engine based on the Graph API and will be also feed with the elements prioritized by Business-lines in Powell 365.
• We are already thinking about adding to Insights with our own data from our Gamification module and will trust our partners to define the relevant dashboards for our customers
• And customers will for sure benefit of the junction of Learning and our Onboarding templates.

 This is true that some features announced for Connections pillar already exist in Powell 365 : the ability to bring an entry point to the News page directly in Teams, a capability that is already available with Powell Intranet. Later this year, Viva Connections will also offer an improved mobile experience currently existing with our Powell Intranet App, which will continue to be a good alternative for users non equipped with O365 licences. As Powell 365 fully relies on Graph API, our customers will be ready "by-design" for any other great upcoming features from Viva.

 A Digital Workplace is the place for bridging all together day-to-day activities, News being a strong entry point: it includes as well other HR processes such as onboarding, Sales process such as Sales RFP, Marketing processes such Social News sharing. 

Within the pandemic situation, we have listened to our customers and prospects and worked on use-cases to cover all day-to-day activities and helping HR on employees engagement in the hybrid workplace, such as Virtual Coffee Machine, FleskDesk booking, Gamification. You can discover some of them here : Powell Software - YouTube

Being close to our customers and having the ability to react in a agile mode to their business requirements is one of Powell Software core-value awarded by the market.

A Digital Workplace involves usually 3 user-personas in the organizations: the employee, the contributor (HR, Marketing, Comm) and the IT admin. Powell 365 has been awarded to strongly address all these roles on a wide scope of services, while sometimes Microsoft 365 native services does not totally fit to less technical-savvy people.

Some organizations also need a Digital Workplace designed with their branding, without inducting significant custom development costs. This is another unique value prop where Powell 365 shines and nicely add-on Sharepoint & Microsoft Viva Connections and that our partners around the globe like to better accompany our customers

From a technology stand-point, the value prop from Powell 365 remains the ability to propose ready-to use templates (Intranet, Teams, Mobile app) which can be customized to match with company business requirements & branding , the ability to deploy them at scale and the ability to make them continuously evolve upon the organization evolutions without starting from scratch.

This is the reason why Powell 365 will continue to add on Microsoft 365 & now Microsoft Viva ?